[garettmd]

I think many people are missing the point that this doesn't appear to be a finished product ready for developers to use. It looks like Eclipse's goal is to make a foundation that others can customize for their purposes, building off of what VSCode has already done.

That's not to say this is a good idea or not, but I think all the comments asking "Why would anyone switch to this from VSCode" are missing the point.

[core-questions]

> I think many people are missing the point that this doesn't appear to be a finished product ready for developers to use.

It's absolutely a finished product, GitPod is the commercially available (and white-label-able) version, people are productively using this today, including using VSCode addons and writing their own.

> "Why would anyone switch to this from VSCode"

Imagine preparing a Docker image of everything reasonably needed in your dev environment, and then giving your developers one click access to be totally set up with company-standard configuration. The IDE goes from wild-west everyone working their own way, to something that can be supported, where new devs can be brought up to speed in days instead of weeks, something with real consistency.

[rubyn00bie]

You ever see one VIM or Emacs user try to use someone else’s setup? I’d be shocked if there were any productivity gains... this seems like something that managers want to say but is disconnected from reality.

[core-questions]

I actually have - because I've built an environment for a bunch of Emacs / Lisp developers, that uses a container + Emacs + VNC, so that they literally connect up to identical, pre-configured sessions - like the spiritual predecessor of the cloud IDE.

What this replaced was madness. We could never train anyone up before. We couldn't sit with each other and debug stuff. Agreeing on how things will work is key on a team that expects to do things like pairs programming, even if it means everyone sacrifices a bit of muscle memory.

[willberman]

I made the mistake of recommending standardization of development tooling at one point. Not one of my finer moments.

[ckolkey]

At one point in my vimrc I decided that P and p needed to be swapped...

[battery_cowboy]

You can do that already in vscode easily with the container remote add-on.

[k__]

If MS could pull their cart out of the dirt with VSCode, why not Eclipse?

[battery_cowboy]

I laughed really hard, thanks.

[kls]

And why would they not just consolidate their efforts into improving VS code. I don't get it, VS Code is an awesome platform, no need to reinvent the wheel we just need more high quality extensions to improve it support for different technologies.

[atonse]

Yeah when I see a project like this, I think of all the wasted time that all these talented teams could save by combining forces.

At the end of the day, after who knows how much effort, this thing looks IDENTICAL to VS Code. So what was the point of all the work, apart from Not-Invented-Here? VS Code is MIT licensed. So what exactly is the concern about one company running it? Anyone can fork it and do whatever they want.

[afshin]

Theia runs inside a web browser. VS Code doesn't.

[kls]

The question is, did they approach the VS code team and ask them if they where opposed to this feature. Assuming it does not break anything I cannot see why they would be. I get it, it's open source they can do as they please it just seems to me like the logical first step would be to say hey can we combine efforts. Maybe they did, I don't know, that is the approach I personally would take, improve an already awesome open source offering with my efforts as opposed to creating a one off. I would prefer to feed a larger ecosystem and make the pie bigger.

[jamesgeck0]

Microsoft already got VS Code running in the browser. It's called Visual Studio Online, and it's closed source.

[dntrkv]

They are working with the VS Code team and Theia uses Monaco and other OSS components shared with VS Code.