this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025

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439

Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks (www.theregister.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by neme@lemm.ee to c/programming@programming.dev

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[–] vermaterc@lemmy.ml 184 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

A few things to point out:

Microsoft created this extension and pays money to develop it
Despite that, they give it to programmers for free. It is still free of charge.
They explicitly said that using it outside of their products is forbidden (according to article: at least 5 years ago), they just didn't enforce it
Someone (here: Cursor developers), despite that, used it in their products and started to make money from it

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?

[–] Tarqon@lemmy.world 126 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 74 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 13 points 2 weeks ago

This was all people were talking about when they bought GitHub. We've past the "Extend" stage now.

[–] Eyedust@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 2 weeks ago

One that's worked for Microsoft many times before (docx, for example). Its their favorite loophole.

[–] x00z@lemmy.world 70 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It's also blocked in VSCodium whose developers are not making money off it.

So that's not a nice thing.

[–] monogram@feddit.nl 20 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 43 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] recall519@lemm.ee 22 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] obbeel@lemmy.eco.br 1 points 3 days ago

I think owning a platform like GitHub and acting like you can profit out of your code (not your product) isn't good news.

[–] vivendi@programming.dev 23 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Well; companies used to get anti-trust laser canon'ed from orbit for less; but good luck with that in modern America

[–] ByteJunk@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] cley_faye@lemmy.world 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The problem is that they’re killing competition.

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.

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[–] priapus@sh.itjust.works 20 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Plus you can always just use clangd. Its what I've always used with every text editor that has LSP support.

[–] XPost3000@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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

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[–] PokerChips@programming.dev 11 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 10 points 2 weeks ago

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.

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[–] PushButton@lemmy.world 84 points 2 weeks ago

Oh, Microsoft is pulling the rug under your feet?

That's fuckin' news right there!

[–] EfreetSK@lemmy.world 77 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Here we go!!! I was expecting the enshitification of this thing for past couple of years

[–] deadcream@sopuli.xyz 36 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

You are late. They have already did the same with C# extension, and made it closed source too.

[–] synapse3252@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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)

[–] copygirl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 points 2 weeks ago

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.

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[–] cley_faye@lemmy.world 11 points 2 weeks ago

It was explicitly said to not use this outside of VSCode, so, I'm not sure where the surprise comes from.

[–] chakli@lemmy.world 58 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

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.

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[–] nesc@lemmy.cafe 38 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

Developers developers developers

[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 17 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Ballmer was definitely one of the CEOs of all time. I'm not convinced cocaine didn't play a large role in shaping Microsoft.

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[–] throws_lemy@lemmy.nz 36 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

sounds like M$'s real face : Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish

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[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 29 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Good example why you don't want to use and rely on proprietary software (the extension is not 100% open source as I understand), if there are free (as in source code and license) alternatives.

[–] spacecadet@lemm.ee 23 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

A professor once told me “don’t trust ‘free software’ from a megacorp”, most important thing I learned in college.

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[–] Realitaetsverlust@lemmy.zip 27 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Ramenator@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

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

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[–] badmin@lemm.ee 27 points 2 weeks ago

Microsoft

C/C++ extension

VS Code

so sad 🎤 🎻😢

[–] fubarx@lemmy.world 27 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Good opportunity for Jetbrains to jump in. Maybe if they MIT licensed their community-edition tools.

[–] flubba86@lemmy.world 17 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

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.

[–] carrylex@lemmy.world 14 points 2 weeks ago

Not sure if you read this blog post: https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2025/04/unified-pycharm/

Rest assured – our commitment to open-source development remains as strong as ever. The Community Edition codebase will stay public on GitHub, and we’ll continue to maintain and update it. We’ll also provide an easy way to build PyCharm from source via GitHub Actions.

PyCharm is - like all JetBrains IDEs - based on intellij-community and the "Pro" stuff just some fancy pre-installed plugin that requires a license.

Alternatively, you may choose to manually switch to the new PyCharm immediately and keep using everything you have now for free, plus the support for Jupyter notebooks.

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...

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[–] daskye@fedia.io 25 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I think a lot of people would really benefit from learning neovim

[–] lonesomeCat@lemmy.ml 13 points 2 weeks ago

Or Helix, it has a less steeper curve

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 22 points 2 weeks ago

They pulled the same thing with their widely used office format: base capabilities are standardised but most useful stuff is proprietary extension.

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 22 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 13 points 2 weeks ago

Stallman was right, episode five billion.

[–] Mubelotix@jlai.lu 12 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Just violate their rules and enable the microsoft extensions on forks

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[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Maybe we need a new movement (or revisit past ideas from the 70s) that focuses on ensuring the openness regarding freedoms of computing (😉) that combat proprietary SaaS offerings? idk.

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.

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[–] enemenemu@lemm.ee 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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?

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 37 points 2 weeks ago

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.json it'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.

[–] cybrefool@lemmy.wtf 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Does Nano and GCC still work ok?

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Only if you are desperate or masochistic.

[–] lagoon8622@sh.itjust.works 9 points 2 weeks ago

I would never use nano because vim is right there

[–] UpperBroccoli@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 2 weeks ago

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.

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