Choosing between Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio may depend as much on your work style as on the language support and features you need. Here’s how to decide.

For decades, when I got to work in the morning, I would start Microsoft Visual Studio (or one of its predecessors, such as Visual C++ or Visual InterDev), then brew tea and possibly attend a morning meeting while it went through its laborious startup. I would keep the IDE open all day as I went through develop/test/debug cycles to avoid another startup delay. When I worked on a C++ project with

2 million lines of code, I also jump-started each day’s work by automatically running a batch script that did a code checkout and full rebuild of the product in the wee hours.

The startup overhead of Visual Studio has decreased significantly over the years, by the way. It’s now a non-issue even in huge Visual Studio 2022 projects.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Software engineering estimates are garbage ]

Meanwhile, Visual Studio Code usually starts up quickly enough that I can be productive in a few minutes, even for large projects. I said usually, not always: Visual Studio Code itself needs a monthly update, and the many extensions I have installed often need their own updates. Still, even updating a dozen extensions in Visual Studio Code takes much less time than Visual Studio used to take to rebuild the symbol tables of a large C++ project.

Still, choosing between Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio is not as simple as choosing between a lightweight editor and a heavyweight IDE. While Visual Studio Code is highly configurable, Visual Studio is highly complete. Your choice may depend as much on your work style as on the language support and features you need. Let’s take a look at the capabilities and the trade-offs of these two development tools.

What is Visual Studio Code?

Visual Studio Code is a lightweight but powerful source code editor that runs on your desktop and is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It comes with built-in support for JavaScript, TypeScript, and Node.js and has a rich ecosystem of extensions for other languages (such as C++, C#, Java, Python, PHP, and Go) and runtimes (such as .NET and Unity).

Aside from the whole idea of being lightweight and starting quickly, VS Code has IntelliSense code completion for variables, methods, and imported modules; graphical debugging; linting , multi-cursor editing, parameter hints, and other powerful editing features; snazzy code navigation and refactoring; and built-in source code control including Git support. Much of this was adapted from Visual Studio technology.

VS Code proper is built using the Electron shell, Node.js, TypeScript, and the Language Server protocol, and is updated on a monthly basis. The extensions are updated as often as needed. The richness of support varies across the different programming languages and their extensions, ranging from simple syntax highlighting and bracket matching to debugging and refactoring. You can add basic support for your favorite language through TextMate colorizers if no language server is available.

The code in the VS Code repository is open source under the MIT License. The VS Code product itself ships under a standard Microsoft product license, as it has a small percentage of Microsoft-specific customizations. It’s free despite the commercial license.

Visual Studio Code viewing the source code for itself. Note the messages (created using information from the Git repository) that show the authors of the functions and the most recent change dates. Also note the “peek” popup for trackSelection() in the middle of the screen.