376
Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
376 points (97.5% liked)
Programming
19813 readers
886 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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?
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.
Better tools such as...?
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.
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.
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.
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.