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Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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A few things to point out:
What exactly are you mad at? When will programming community finally understand that Microsoft is not a non-profit company and its primary purpose is to make money?
I heard Theo talking about this and I think he guessed that they don't want to maintain these against forks is the number of people raising issues that are not related to the extension and more due to the fork.
His video goes into a lot of good detail as to what's likely going on.
What Theo also says is that remember that they don't make any money off of VSCode at all.
Because a .vscode still pollute most open source projects. It"s annoying that they get people hooked on it that could use better tools instead.
How dare people choose their own software? Don't they know theyre supposed to let you choose it for them?
Better tools such as...?
nvim
Neovim plus tmux.
Don't be upset it took people a long time to realize Visual Studio Code is fauxpen source, just be glad they're finally realizing it. No need to be condescending and make people feel ashamed over it.
https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ Because pretending your editor is open source while moving all the important functionality to proprietary plugins is a bait and switch.
Embrace.
Extend.
~~Extinguish~~. Extract rent now that everyone lives in / depends on your proprietary ecosystem.
I'd say they can't keep getting away with it!, but history shows they clearly can.
Literally monopolist strategy 101.
This was all people were talking about when they bought GitHub. We've past the "Extend" stage now.
One that's worked for Microsoft many times before (docx, for example). Its their favorite loophole.
The problem is that they're killing competition. Treating a company with the market dominance of Microsoft like a normal company would be fatal for humanity. Because they are eliminating innovation by Cursor and they do not need to do this to finance their own innovation. Effectively, humanity gets less innovation by Microsoft doing this.
So, they pay to develop a product, for themselves, explicitly says "it's only for us, shoo shoo", and when they decide that their product, that they pay for, and provide for free to their user, should not be used by other, it kills the competition that did not do anything except take the product for free despite being told not to?
I'm not on the side of Microsoft for most things. But if doing nothing but taking someone else's free product qualifies to be competition that should be protected, we're having problems.
You're looking at it in isolation, I'm looking at it in terms of this being Microsoft, a company which has held humanity back for most of its existence, now retracting something where they did a decent thing for once.
But Microsoft developed it in the first place. It's perfectly within their rights to pull it and developers making money off of their work isn't bad either. I love a good pitchfork to corporate, but this is honestly fine.
Well; companies used to get anti-trust laser canon'ed from orbit for less; but good luck with that in modern America
I wholeheartedly agree that monopolistic practices should be nuked instantly, but I disagree that this was ever well enforced. Microsoft got away with murder in the 90's before they went to court and even then, feels like they got a slap on the wrist...
I think that this particular case is very far from that, but it does start to smell the same.
You should study about the trustbusting era of early 1900s. Then in the late 70s a new law reinforced antitrust legislation.
The issue is that the pendulum swings fast away from trustbusting and slowly back to it. Trustbusting creates economic development and prosperity, reducing public outcry for it, and capitalists yank the levers of government again towards monopoly building.
You mention the nineties, by even then Netscape successfully challenged Microsoft. But it was too little too late. The pendulum was already swinging back to monopoly, and it's reaching it's maximum in our days.
It's also blocked in VSCodium whose developers are not making money off it.
So that's not a nice thing.
At least VSCodium cares about software licenses, (see it works both ways)
That Cursor (an AI focused) fork doesn’t shouldn’t be very shocking.
Plus you can always just use clangd. Its what I've always used with every text editor that has LSP support.
Honestly moving to clangd has got to be the single best thing I've done in C++, it's cross platform and I've found it to be significantly faster, more reliable, and more featureful than Microsoft's C++ plugin by a long shot
I havent used vscode in while but I do remember having a lot of issues with the Microsoft C++ plugin, especially in large projects. I switched to clangd very quickly.
Clang is a better C++ compiler than msvc, it generates faster binaries and can compile complex code that msvc errs on at least in my experience YMMV.
I wish there was a GCC equivalent; but even if clang is a corpowhore project it's atleast OSS
Another reason to hate LLMs on the list.