I wonder if it means a transition to Visual Studio Code at some point. I doubt it would happen soon, but I feel like there's a lot more support behind that IDE than MonoDevelop.
> MonoDevelop is a clone of Visual Studio written in C#
They might have great intentions with MonoDevelop when it first launched, but it has been lagging behind other IDEs forever. With things like IntelliJ Rider, this position is not going to improve.
From my perspective Microsoft has done more with Visual Studio Code since its release 10 months ago than MonoDevelop has done in a decade. I'd argue it's easier to extend VSC to use it for C# development (which it already supports [1]) than to get MonoDevelop on par with modern IDEs.
And despite being JS/TS, the IDE is very very fast.
The vscode source is very well "layered". It's not totally inconceivable that the vscode folks or some other team take it and allow you to choose at build time whether to target it's current DOM-backed UI or one backed by more "native" drawing routines and widgets.
It's weird to bring up slowness when VSCode is much more amenable for use on machines with meager specs than MonoDevelop is. Why do you care what language your editor is written in unless you're submitting patches, anyway?
OmniSharp powered intellisense and other features are easy enough to stick in VS Code. It's easier to package and deploy than MonoDevelop. Much easier (at least for me) to write extensions for VS Code. I see it as a win-win. MonoDevelop has always been a frustrating experience for me. While VS Code isn't perfect, I'm less frustrated using it than MonoDevelop.
MonoDevelop is a clone of Visual Studio written in C# which isn't even remotely compatible with the mis-named Visual Studio Code.
If they want to port MonoDevelop to Visual Studio Code, they would have to re-write all the features from scratch.
At this point they might as well re-write Visual Studio to node.js and not waste time on porting MonoDevelop.
I hope it doesn't happen. I certainly don't want to develop on an IDE written on top of a God-awful language with a ridiculously slow run-time.