Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/24/microsoft_vs_code_subtracts_cc_extension/Open linkView original on lemm.ee436
Comments98https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/24/microsoft_vs_code_subtracts_cc_extension/Open linkView original on lemm.ee
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?
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.
It's also blocked in VSCodium whose developers are not making money off it.
So that's not a nice thing.
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.
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.
I think owning a platform like GitHub and acting like you can profit out of your code (not your product) isn't good news.
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.
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
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?
You can choose whatever software you want. You can use WYSIWYG for all i care.
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.
Another reason to hate LLMs on the list.
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.
Oh, Microsoft is pulling the rug under your feet?
That's fuckin' news right there!
Here we go!!! I was expecting the enshitification of this thing for past couple of years
You are late. They have already did the same with C# extension, and made it closed source too.
I'm not up-to-date: what did they do to the C# extension? I've been using it on a personal project and haven't experienced anything egregiously terrible (yet)
A lot of the C# ecosystem is open source (thank goodness), but the official debugger isn't, hence it only being available in the proprietary version of VSCode.
They did it with python about 2 years ago.
It was explicitly said to not use this outside of VSCode, so, I'm not sure where the surprise comes from.
If someone is looking for an alternative, use the clangd extension. It’s much better compared to the Microsoft one. LLDB extension is good for debugging. Also works with gdb.
The only things I am lacking now is the one for remote, python.
Oooh I’ll give it a try, wasn’t aware of it.
BasedPyright should have you covered on the Python end, the downside is you also need to install the PyPi package.
Have used it and it’s excellent, even has additional features over Pylance
Do you still have refactoring tools with it, like symbol renaming, go to definition, and extract method?
I think so, and it might even be a feature of the upstream Microsoft OSS Pyright, so even that version should(?) have those features available
No Pyright is just a type checker. The IDE features are part of Pylance which is closed source.
I am trying to figure out how to get zephyr, platformio, and nrfconnect to work with clangd.
Platformio screams every second because Microsoft's tooling is a dependency.
Zephyr and nrfconnect work for many things, but things like including drivers from zephyr/drivers doesn't autofill which is annoying if you are searching for a driver that might exist in nrfconnect or might not because there are some differences. It also doesn't autofill macros and device tree defines.
If anyone has a good guide on how to set up clangd for zephyr, I would appreciate it!
Based on https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/develop/getting_started/index.html Zephyr seems to use cmake
So you should be able to use https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/variable/CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS.html to generate the compile commands json and configure clangd to use that.
Yeah, I have that set that via
set(CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS ON)but no compile_commands.json are actually output, sadly.Developers developers developers
Ballmer was definitely one of the CEOs of all time. I'm not convinced cocaine didn't play a large role in shaping Microsoft.
Okay…. Cocaine probably played a large part
Best cocaine in Puget Sound comes from Bellevue, prove me wrong
Challenge accepted, but you provide the samples
https://youtu.be/8zEQhhaJsU4
I. Love. This. Company!
sounds like M$'s real face : Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish
I would say they are doing the same with Linux, but I'll just wait for it to become obvious.
they're desperate to do it and have their buddies at IBM to help too.
A company that is known for doing shitty things does shitty things.
Color me fucking surprised.
Honestly, at this point, I have ZERO sympathy for people who are still actively using microsoft products and running into problems.
Yeah, they have already done this with other extensions like Python, this is not new behavior.
Honestly the biggest reason to stay away from VS Code
What are other free and good ide's though?
Closest? VScodium lol
Kate, KDevelop, QtCreator are the ones I use.
Good opportunity for Jetbrains to jump in. Maybe if they MIT licensed their community-edition tools.
Jetbrains have gone the opposite direction unfortunately. The latest version of PyCharm came with the announcement that PyCharm Community is being discontinued. Instead, they will provide just one PyCharm (the closed source one) formerly PyCharm Professional, that can operated in a Basic (Free) mode, or a Pro (Licenced) mode. Also, some features that were free in Community edition will be moved to the Pro mode in the new PyCharm.
It doesn't affect me personally because my workplace pays for a pro subscription for me, but I used PyCharm Community for 4 years during uni and I'm sad it's going.
Not sure if you read this blog post: https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2025/04/unified-pycharm/
PyCharm is - like all JetBrains IDEs - based on intellij-community and the "Pro" stuff just some fancy pre-installed plugin that requires a license.
So all community functionallities will also be available in the unified edition for free.
Also the Pro license - which you can also get 4 free in like 10 different ways - pricing is extremely fair: A license costs $100-60 for an individual, which is cheaper than most streaming subscriptions...
Just came across another option. For those getting blocked by MSFT: https://theia-ide.org/
personally, after trying theia, i know its good, but its extremely hard to configure some things like i want to, because even though it is the same editor as they put it, i cant do some things the same way. Found issues about this, turns out they are from 2019. Kind of sucks.
University students get free pro licenses for jetbrains IDEs I think
Yes you're right, they do. But 10 years ago when I was studying, my university (in Australia) was not on their list of valid academic institutions.
I still have access to my uni email address, and earlier this year I found indeed I could use it to get access to a free Jetbrains student licence.
Wow, that's so sad. I loved Pycharm.
i've been on the zed wagon for months
so sad 🎤 🎻😢
I think a lot of people would really benefit from learning neovim
Or Helix, it has a less steeper curve
Not an issue. Install Clangd and CodeLLDB. They are much better anyway (see my other comment).
The real golden jewel that Microsoft keeps to itself is the Remote SSH extension. There's no open source alternative as far as I know.
There's also Pylance but that only matters if you're using Python.
They pulled the same thing with their widely used office format: base capabilities are standardised but most useful stuff is proprietary extension.
Just violate their rules and enable the microsoft extensions on forks
That's just it, these extensions themselves refuse to run if the fork doesn't say it is vs code. You'd have to build it yourself to report compliant information to the extension, or build the extension yourself to not check. Both of which are not trivial.
This is why OSS as an org needs a change IMO. Licenses like SSPLv1, where software can be supplied for free with options that allow a company to make money without risk of a cloud vendor snapping up their software (think Redis, MongoDB, etc) need a place at the table.
The SSPL requires that all software used to deploy SSPL software is open sourced. If I deploy my software on Windows, do I have to provide the source code for Windows? What about the proprietary hardware drivers, or Intel Management Engine?
The SSPL is not the next generation of licenses, it is effectively unusable. And both Redis and Mongo, dual licensed their software as the SSPL, and a proprietary license — effectively making their entire software proprietary.
Except Redis, and Mongo were making money. They had well valued, well earning SAAS offerings — it's just that the offerings integrated into existing cloud vendors would be more popular (because vendor lock in). They just wanted more money, and were hoping that by going proprietary, they could force customers away from the cloud offers to themselves, and massively increase their revenue.. They did not get that.
Another thing is that it's not "stealing" Mongo/Redis' when cloud vendors offer SAAS's of Mongo/Redis. Mongo/Redis, and their SAAS offerings, are only possible because the same cloud vendors put more money than Mongo/Redis make yearly into Linux and other software that powers the SAAS offerings of Mongo/Redis, like Kubernetes. Without that software, Mongo/Redis wouldn't have a SAAS offering at all.
I definitely think that it's bad when a piece of software doesn't get any funding it needs to develop, especially when it powers much more modern software, like XZ. But Mongo/Redis weren't suffering from a lack of funding at all. They're just mad they had to share their toys, and tried to take them away. But it didn't even matter in the end.
It looks like the extension is licensed under MIT https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-cpptools You can "simply" fork it and provide builds yourself, right?
Not the case. There are binary components.
It doesn't matter though because the Clangd & CodeLLDB extensions completely replace it and are actually waaaaaaay better.
With Microsoft's C++ extension it always rinsed the CPU - there were files I had to avoid opening because then it would analyse them and I'd have to kill it. The code intelligence also seemed very "heuristic" and was quite slow.
Clangd fixes all of that. It's fast, doesn't choke on huge files, and if you have
compile_commands.jsonit's actually the first properly fast and robust C++ IDE I've ever used. You know if you've used a Java IDE the code intelligence just works and is fast and reliable. It's like that.Does Nano and GCC still work ok?
Only if you are desperate or masochistic.
I would never use nano because vim is right there
Maybe it's just me, but I never got that thing to work right anyway - with VSC. It keeps running amok and using up all the CPU time doing stuff it should not be doing, trying to analyze every single file in my VM every single time it is started.
So... good riddance.
The Eclipse Theia IDE vs VS Code
I WILL find these people and hurt them. Nobody will blame me.
I hate the way it sounds but, at the same time, it is simpler and more regular.
So is "I runned to the shop and buyed a bottle of milk".
"Layout" is a noun made from a verb. Just say "how the views can be laid out". You can't make a verb out of a noun made from a verb. It makes my brainies ouchie.
Your example doesn't quite fit the crime. A better example would be. "I ran and catch upped to him." Or "These clothes are available to be try onned."
To be fair I once asked an Italian what was the hardest part of English and they said compound verbs, so maybe they're just not native English.
That's my charitable explanation anyway. If not I'm joining the hunt!
I think they did a good job of writing a neutral comparison. Based on what it said, I think there's no reason for me to stop using VS Code right now, but I'll keep an eye on Theia and reconsider it my needs change.
Theia website
holy shit! the thing I've been warning developers who promote and use this shitty tool has finally happened.
shockedpikachu.jpeg
if you write fossy software, don't use products made by fossy enemies.
An AI company not respecting copyright and licensing? I'm shocked.
https://open-vsx.org/extension/llvm-vs-code-extensions/vscode-clangd
Maybe not as feature complete but should be a good alternative
I started using Lapce. That or Zed just I installed Lapce first. I still use VS Code at work but personal machines I've moved on
between lapse and zed I also decided on Lapse because it feels much more community-oriented than Zed; maybe you should look into that
I hope people switch to Lapce and it gets great extension support. First I tried it after years of vs code, it opens so fast. It's like back in the day of sublime text, notepad++/notepadqq. I haven't tried to see how ridiculously large of a log file I can open in it yet
More and more engineers wok with cursor.
Stallman's achievements were significantly tarnished when he went on a fame-grab while surfing Linus's coat-tails.
He's still been right about most of what he says regardless of how stupid people responded. We live in the dystopia he was fighting against and clearly saw coming.