sterlinm

Devcontainers are a good example of their strategy. VS Code's source code is open source, but the devcontainers extension is not [2] and alternative vscode-in-the-browser providers are not able to use the devcontainers extension as they're not allowed to use the official VS Code extension marketplace.

[1] https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ [2] https://twitter.com/castrojo/status/1671544329402302464?s=20

Comment · 3 years ago

I'm kind of obsessed with this space and have spent way too long setting up VS Code and RStudio IDEs on my homelab.

One area I struggle with when thinking about building container-based development environments is the best way to avoid mixing in your IDE specific dependencies with your project dependencies. I think some of the commercial tools do this, but I haven't gotten in set up well in my homelab.

I just came across two articles by a former GitPod employer who moved to Coder (these are the two main providers of open-source VS Code in the browser solutions). They're both really interesting.

The first is on how effectively Microsoft has used VS Code to fracture the market place to their advantage by strategically open-sourcing parts of VS Code while keeping many of its best features proprietary (Pylance, the python language server is a good example of this). https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

The second article is about why he thinks Coder's strategy is more promising than GitPod's prompting him to go work for them. It's not as detailed, but it touches on some of the parts of container-based development environments that I've found overly limiting. https://ghuntley.com/integrate/

Comment · 3 years ago

Why does “pip install gcc” keep failing then? ;)

Conda isn’t perfect but takes on a lot of problems that pip doesn’t deal with at all. Regular conda is really slow these days but you can use mamba instead or just configure conda to use the libmamba solver and it’s much nicer.

The folks at prefix.dev seem to be building some pretty cool drop in replacements for conda too.