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

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. 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. Meanwhile, Visual Studio Code usually starts up quickly enough that I can be productive in a few minutes, even for large projects. It’s now a non-issue even in huge Visual Studio 2022 projects. The startup overhead of Visual Studio has decreased significantly over the years, by the way. 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.

I would keep the IDE open all day as I went through develop/test/debug cycles to avoid another startup delay. 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.

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