Facebook announced that it will use Visual Studio Code, a source code editor developed by Microsoft, as its default development environment. In the future, Facebook will work with Microsoft to expand remote development extensions for Visual Studio Code so that engineers can do large-scale remote development.
Facebook engineers write millions of code, but the default development environment has not been specified so far, so developers have different development environments, such as writing what they want individually or using Nuclide, an integrated development environment developed by Facebook. .
NuClyde started with a set of open source packages built on the basis of the text editor Atom, and was developed to support several programming languages used in Facebook. In 2018, the open source version of NuClyde disappeared, but it is said that Facebook continued to use it inside the company.
However, Facebook announced plans to convert Nuclyde to Visual Studio Code in late 2018. It is said that some of Nucleide’s features were moved to Visual Studio Code using extensions, and now many engineers within Facebook also use Visual Studio Code. On the other hand, Nucleide’s official site has stopped updating after the announcement that it will remove the open source version.
As for the reason Facebook chose Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code as its default development environment, it said that Visual Studio Code was a popular development tool and received a lot of investment and support from not only Microsoft but also the open source community. It also said that it supports macOS, Windows, and Linux, and provides a clearly defined extension API to build critical functions for large-scale development held within Facebook. As a result, you can safely leave the future of the development platform to Visual Studio Code.
Facebook has formed an alliance with Microsoft on remote development to create an environment where in-house engineers can perform remote development more smoothly. Facebook engineers install Visual Studio code on a local PC, but the actual development is said to be done directly on the development server located in the data center. Therefore, it aims to increase efficiency and productivity by making the server code accessible in a seamless way.
Facebook expects that using the Visual Studio Code Remote Extension feature will bring many benefits even in advanced development environments. Facebook cooperated with Microsoft to build a dedicated development environment tailored to specific dependencies for each project without worrying about errors, the ability to work faster and more efficiently than using a local PC, and affect the performance of local resources and tools. It aims to realize the flexibility to quickly switch between multiple running development environments.
In addition, Facebook is constantly working to create an integrated development environment that can use Visual Studio Code in-house. As many programming languages are used, the development of extended functions that support them is a representative example. In addition, since Facebook uses Mercurial as its source management infrastructure, it is also making efforts to develop extensions that allow source control tasks to be performed directly from Visual Studio code. Related information can be found here .