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.

What is visual studio code good for