aryamaan · 6 years ago

Didn't we already solve this problem with containers?

sneak · 6 years ago

There are perpetual reminders all around that Microsoft's only pretending to like f/oss because that's where the developer attention (and thus corporate money) is. There's spyware in all of their open source apps (TypeScript excluded, because they couldn't get away with it there) that you can of course patch out, but you can't get it removed from the project because, free software or not, Microsoft gets to decide what goes in or out.

Bet you a dollar the GitHub mobile app that's going to come out pretty soon will also be totally proprietary with no source provided. It's a growing trend in developer tooling: even Docker's desktop versions (not Microsoft's fault, but still) are not even open source (much less free software).

It's going to be really sad in a few years when Microsoft starts turning the screws to extract more revenue from this free software ecosystem (GitHub/npm) that they are coming to exert major control over.

Soon, the most common "industry standard" tooling for the largest and most popular software development ecosystem (javascript) will rely heavily on proprietary software that spies on you continuously while you use it, just like Windows.

_jal · 6 years ago

Reminds me of a job in a past life I was quite happy to leave. It seemed like all I did was clean up low-end websites compromised through Frontpage extensions.

That was a year I'll never get back, but I do highly recommend the fun of leaving _vti_bin/ directories laying around with funny-behaving things in them. Every few months I still see evidence in my personal site logs of a script kiddie slowly becoming enraged as they figure out I left them a busy box to play with.

soVeryTired · 6 years ago

Are you sure it needs a remote component? The remote SSH dev experience is actually pretty good in python.

shaklee3 · 6 years ago

Use the remote containers plugin and that problem goes away.

dastbe · 6 years ago

remote dev (and I guess now codespaces) is one of those "clear differentiators" that is actually getting me to move away from intellij and friends.

zimmund · 6 years ago

How does it work with poor or slow internet connection?

plexicle · 6 years ago

The SSH plugin is insanely good. I can dev from a Windows machine and SSH into my Mac and do React Native (native) iOS modules. Even my zsh shell acts as if it's local. Running `pod install` from Windows. It's seemless.

lawik · 6 years ago

So nice when it works and has been breaking incredibly badly for me recently. The Python extensions that vscode was trying to bring up whenever I connected to my remote had some weird interaction with a virtualenv and just pinned the server to 100% CPU and rendered it completely unresponsive. Repeatedly. Reboot to recover.

Generally extremely good, but for obvious reasons this makes me think twice about connecting to some things.

dleslie · 6 years ago

Emacs has had Tramp for ages, which does this. Yes, it's amazing. :)

steve_adams_86 · 6 years ago

I agree. I was floored by how well it worked, and actually had doubts that it was working in the way I expected it to/it's supposed to. It was just so seamless and natural. I kept thinking there was no way it was using the correct configuration, running the right scripts, etc.

It was a lifesaver too. I was using a severely under-powered ThinkPad and I'm admittedly awful with Windows. Being able to quickly swap to that remote setup reduced a tremendous amount of friction for me.

When good software works, it's so cool.

scoutt · 6 years ago

It's amazing!

I've been doing some AOSP customization (Android 9) and I have several remote (Ubuntu) servers hosting/building OS images for different implementations (it takes too much disk space for a local PC and even so, I have a Windows based PC because of reasons, so if I had to use VMs, it would be too slow).

Now I can use intellisense through the entire Linux folder without delays. And... a global search for a string takes no more than 2 seconds. And I am talking about a string search through the entire codebase (not just the kernel; thousands of files).

My days are brighter, my life happier, my mood changed; thank you whoever invented this!

birracerveza · 6 years ago

True, I love it and it has been a game changer. The only problem with that is that it only works with the official VSCode, not with the OSS counterpart, which is a damn shame.

WorldMaker · 6 years ago

You can register your own machines with Visual Studio Codespaces: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/bring-your-own-m...

It's not entirely self-hosted, but it's an interesting hybrid middle-ground.

nhooyr · 6 years ago

Coming soon :)

ta17711771 · 6 years ago

First time hearing of Theia - thanks!

twunde · 6 years ago

Similarly Github Actions is reusing a lot of Azure Pipelines under the hood.

One of the most impressive parts about Microsoft's recent acquisitions is how quickly essentially two separate companies are now sharing code. It's hard enough to get different teams/products in the same company to use shared code in a meaningful way, and Microsoft has accomplished it with a new company.

nojvek · 6 years ago

So I imagine this is similar to codesandbox.io which already lets you do frontendy bits?

I imagine the way Code spaces works is you spin up a container in azure with checked out GitHub branch, vscode on the browser then interfaces with the container(s).

Pretty neat idea if you can customize the docker container setup like a simple docker compose file or something.

ramraj07 · 6 years ago

For the love of God please make it work at least manageably in phones! Tall ask no doubt, but y'all seem capable of it. GitHub does everything right except getting the phone experience right!

janik · 6 years ago

Is the codespaces team hiring by any chance? I took a look at GitHub Jobs, and there are a few positions I could apply to there, but none directly related.

ryan-allen · 6 years ago

I'm very excited about this! I hope you can host Codespaces in Australia as well so the latency is nice and fast! I tried VSO but I could only deploy to Singapore and it wasn't fast enough for me in Australia.

Super super super excited!

dklend122 · 6 years ago

Can we please have Julia support? :)

espadrine · 6 years ago

I don’t know Visual Studio Codespaces.

Something I don’t yet understand about GitHub Codespaces is: can you execute a Dockerfile from it? Can you execute multiple ones? Can you execute docker-compose configurations?

Is it just an editor, or can it also spin an AWS (or Azure?) instance of the code you are writing?

I have seen people mention they can code from an iPad; but that’s not a complete workstation replacement unless it is easy to run your code.

vnchr · 6 years ago

Three years, and we'll have a version control ribbon to replace all pre-existing UI elements.

marceloabsousa · 6 years ago

I tend to agree, it's quite crazy what they are trying to pull off technically. It's hard to imagine how all these features will not impact the service. Also it's probably just bleeding money... millions of dollars on CodeScan alone.

yarrel · 6 years ago

A thin dusting of "Open Source" over lock-in, spyware, and censorship.

To thunderous applause from people who are fooled by the first element of that.

simplify · 6 years ago

Since when is saying "I think" considered to "proclaim as certainty"?

kick · 6 years ago

Wouldn't be my guess, personally:

https://github.com/atom

abrowne · 6 years ago

No, this is based on VS Code's Visual Studio Online: https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/30/microsofts-visual-studio-o...

oaiey · 6 years ago

Agree. And considering the size of this, they are executing a very well defined playbook. Sounds like a very successful company integration to me. Will be good for everyone.

ta17711771 · 6 years ago

Wow, I was okay with this until I saw the promise to keep Atom around.

That's...scummy.

onionisafruit · 6 years ago

I think it’s saying you’re still using chrome under the covers when you use electron apps.

IAmLiterallyAB · 6 years ago

It's a browser without an address bar.

jsmith45 · 6 years ago

this is not even just replacing your local vs code.

This is a minor variation of the existing Visual Studio Online (now renamed Visual Studio Codespace) product.

The core of it is running an automatically created azure hosted docker container. It automatically checks out your repository. It actually runs the whole VS Code backend on the remote machine, with the the user interface being provided by the "local" VS Code instance (web or desktop).

I'm going to bet this will end up with identical pricing to the existing product, at least if you don't pay for any github products. If you do, there might be some discount or included running time with those products.

The only part that sounds new here is the editor integration into the GitHub site.

ta17711771 · 6 years ago

Can you share what issues you've had?

Been looking at this.

design · 6 years ago

Hey, the first tweet is mine. Codespaces work pretty great on an iPad. We're going to be making improvements to the experience here as we get to GA but we know it's a scenario everyone is really excited about.

dmacewen · 6 years ago

Wow, great to hear!

saagarjha · 6 years ago

Does it work with the software keyboard? I seem to recall Monaco not really supporting mobile.

dvtrn · 6 years ago

Super excited to hear this, I had the exact same question reading the page. Any chance you'd be willing to slip us a peak on when we could reasonably (even a Qx ballpark) on when Beta begins?

_ph_ · 6 years ago

Seems you are about to finally turn the iPad into a good development device :)

forrestthewoods · 6 years ago

My kingdom for native VSCode on iPad. It’d be soooo much better than a Safari version.

dmacewen · 6 years ago

Backend may have been the wrong word, but they mention being able to connect to your codespace from VSCode running on your computer. It would be cool if you could connect to your codespace from vim running on your computer in the same way.

frank2 · 6 years ago

>gitpod.io . . . works great on . . . iPads

gitpod.io is tightly integrated with the Monaco editor; is it not?

I ask because the top of https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/ says, "The Monaco editor is not supported in mobile browsers or mobile web frameworks". Has Microsoft changed their policy and simply neglected to change the passage I just quoted?

CraftThatBlock · 6 years ago

Thank you, very interesting! I use IntelliJ mostly, and this is something I wish was available on that platform

mkchoi212 · 6 years ago

ahh shucks :( But this means it will support Swift so yay??

mkchoi212 · 6 years ago

Awesome! Seems like it's very capable even from launch.

pgroves · 6 years ago

Well then I'm glad you're here...Is it possible to integrate with an existing Dockerfile? My team's main build is handled by an image that is a result of years of fine-tuning and files with external dependency definitions (like requirements.txt for pip). Getting all of that installed in github's container is only slightly easier than getting it all installed in a desktop IDE, which is currently prohibitively difficult for us. We don't want to end up with a second platform we have to maintain.

More generally, is there going to be a clean way to to use this if we already have a containerized stack, especially editing code in a user's existing container? (With the code still under version control, of course)

mikewhy · 6 years ago

Given that a locally running VS Code can interact with the host system, and a webpage cannot, I'm sure there will be some differences between the two.

And like you said, the exception in features could be extensions. If that's the case, it's not "the full Visual Studio Code experience".

(Not to take away from their announcement, it's very interesting and I've joined the wait list, just this type of absolute wording irks me).

airstrike · 6 years ago

Not having extensions alone already means it's not the full experience. How many people run vanilla VS Code?

Can I run unit tests? Debug?

marceloabsousa · 6 years ago

For me, the real appeal is to be able to share dev environments easily and make software development truly remote friendly.

In the end, it will come down to latency, usability and pricing. I do agree with you though - I'm not paying $2K+ for a macbook pro and then pay to run VSCode in the cloud -- something doesn't add up.

rckoepke · 6 years ago

> We'll get to a point where new developers won't even know how to set up a local development environment.

I think we're already there. I think system administration is the current biggest stumbling block that new programmers have. Tools like repl.it, google colab, etc. remove these (stumbling blocks | learning opportunities).

At many universities, a lot of code is now written in online editors that compile, run, and check against public and hidden unit tests (sort of like codewars but lower quality).

I personally love learning systems administration but there is very real demand for services that abstract it all away.

That said, you enumerated an effective roadmap for this kind of transition. I suspect it will generate an increased annual cost similar in magnitude to the Office 365 migration.

saagarjha · 6 years ago

That sounds quite unlikely.

edaemon · 6 years ago

Considering the desktop install is an Electron app I wouldn't think the two would diverge that much.

JoyrexJ9 · 6 years ago

I don't think anyone would suggest this a full time replacement for your dev environment and IDE

topkai22 · 6 years ago

There is preview pricing available for VS Code Spaces, which is almost the same thing. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/visual-stu...

The estimated cost for a full time developer to use the system is $23.30/month or roughly $280 a year. That's quite competitive- my "portable" workstation costs north of $2k and has a 3 year life span, so the "yearly" cost is $666. The benefits of being able to get use cheaper dev terminals in the general case could pay for itself, even before you get to the benefits of having a common environment.

Also, you can self host for free. 50% is an over estimate (I've never seen 50% of developers agree to ANYTHING), but broad adoption looks highly likely.

crdrost · 6 years ago

MS may indeed be willing to take a "huge loss" on this. It may dwarf the added revenue from other sources.

So like I don't know your particular context but I imagine MS's moves would seem surprising for developers, say, at startups. Whereas if you work at an IT adjoint to a mechanical contractor it might make more sense. What's at stake is that MS might be ramping up to some bigger announcement, "GitHub Cloud" or so, where you pay some fee for the cloud hosting and the sales pitch is, "imagine that you can fix a bug from a bug report in a non-crappy editor like VS Code, do a quick code review and push a button which will run your tests, canary deploy, then version it and push it live -- we take care of all that infra, you just pay for the Azure hosting." If you give half of that for free to everybody, you nominally "lose" but you increase the adoption rate of a separate revenue machine, which makes up for it.

A similar strategy was used by Microsoft to make their initial profits with Windows. There it was "you don't have to worry about the hardware specs -- we have already worked all of those out and all of them work with Windows." The key point in both is to say, "what are people seeking out, at the same time as they are seeking out my product?" and then to either give people a lot of freedom or a really easy option. You would rather take one pill that is carefully engineered to have the right omega-3 balance to stave off depression AND is a good probiotic AND has all of your daily vitamins, than to have to bother with a separate fish oil pill and probiotic and multivitamin. Focusing on product "complements" is often a really good strategy.

heavenlyblue · 6 years ago

The issue with PyCharm is that it’s actually quite hard to extend due to lack of proper documentation for their plugins.

I love it but I sometimes think of something that contains less features while is easier to develop for would be a better choice.

arodyginc · 6 years ago

Even for C# VSCode is way less useful than VisualStudio, which also has a free version (though doesn't run on Linux)

dan_quixote · 6 years ago

I've found I love JetBrains IDEs when I'm operating as a one-language power-user. But the last few years I find myself needing to use 2-3 languages in the same day (several more if you include markup "languages"). VSCode has become my editor of choice for local dev and vim for remote dev/debug.

eloff · 6 years ago

I pay for the full JetBrains subscription. While I still use vscode for typescript and rust, I use JetBrains for anything else. It's one of those no brainer purchases that pays for itself within a month.

Programmers create enormous value. If you can get even small single digit percentage improvements by leveraging better tooling, it pays for itself almost right away.

I estimate conservatively I produce $500,000 in value a year. If I can eke out a 1% improvement in productivity that's worth $5000 a year.

I think it's a big blind spot that developers don't invest enough in.

swagonomixxx · 6 years ago

I've been using VS Code's Go and Python plugins for development for the last 2 years and I've never had any major issues. In fact, my experience continues to get better after every release.

With the Go language server kicking off, Go development in VS Code is literally a breeze. Every single thing I'd want to do (format code, imports, run tests, run a particular test, debug a test, breakpoints, on and on) has been integrated into the VS Code plugin and it works pretty much seamlessly. I haven't used Goland since it's early release in 2016 or so, so I might be missing out on something, but it doesn't feel like it.

I've never had a good experience with PyCharm. Again might be because I've using earlier releases and things have gotten better. But I'm at a point where I'm too comfortable with VS Code and have customized it to a point where I don't think it's worth it for me to switch to another editor, especially one that is tied to a particular language.

exdsq · 6 years ago

I think VSCode sets a really good level across all languages (even more esoteric ones like Idris) however it can't compete with IDEs essentially dedicated to a tech stack like PyCharm or Visual Studio.

enitihas · 6 years ago

Yup, VSCode isn't comparable to IntelliJ or the rest at all for anything other than Typescript. IntelliJ offers a bunch of life saving refactorings. Want to extract a new method? Ctrl+Alt+M. The exact same shortcut works in every language, with almost the same semantics as much as possible. Intellij can do context aware autocompletion (Ctrl+Shift+Space).

I use vscode for lightweight file editing. But for any long term project, it doesn't offer anything over Jetbrains products.

harikb · 6 years ago

Just an anecdote from a sample size of one - I had a recent situation where I had to nagivate and edit a code base that was a mix of Go, C++, and JS. And I had a paid IntelliJ Ultimate license. Long story short, VSCode did the best/fastest go-to-defintion like navigation given the constraints. IntelliJ separating Clion to a separate install is rather unfortunate. I can edit Java and Go together, but not C++

Polylactic_acid · 6 years ago

I used to use rubymine a few years ago and maybe I just wasn't using it right but I can do all the stuff in rubymine in vs code. The only thing I'm missing is being able to look through the code for gems.

brndn · 6 years ago

> If I'm not the customer, then I'm the product.

This isn't always true, so it's best to look at it on a case by case basis. One wouldn't suggest that Typescript coders are a product of MS.

So far, they don't seem to be treating vscode users like the product. I think they're are building out great free tooling to entice users to use their other paid services like Azure.

meheleventyone · 6 years ago

> If I'm not the customer, then I'm the product.

This is not necessarily always the case, for example the free thing might be a loss leader, exist to boost secondary or tertiary effects or otherwise exist for non-profit motivated reasons.

topkai22 · 6 years ago

I doubt codespaces will be free- this is how VS Code starts seeing increased monetization. It'll be interesting to see if the self hosted codespace options are no-cost as well.

lern_too_spel · 6 years ago

Even if you're the customer, 99.9% of the time, you're also the product.

recursive · 6 years ago

Do you avoid public drinking fountains? (Covid-19 aside)

swagonomixxx · 6 years ago

> If I'm not the customer, then I'm the product.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, care to expand? Aren't you also the product for JetBrains, since you're one of the customers that's keeping them afloat?

tekkk · 6 years ago

Well, you must then love Oracle. I mean, what you are saying is just silly. Of course the producers of FOSS want something in return, but sometimes it's not nefarious as you might imagine it to be.

It could be a strategical investment to create an ecosystem out of technology that you know the best and can influence its direction, to then sell customizations and develop services on top of it. Like MS is doing here. Or RedHat. Or Google with Kubernetes. Or Canonical with Ubuntu. And so on.

eyelidlessness · 6 years ago

Github has made their pricing model and the motivations for it pretty clear. They subsidize their hosted service with enterprise self-hosted pricing to justify expanding their feature set. This has been true for a long time, well before the MS acquisition. The things that have changed are:

- Developments that were in place were released.

- The subsidization model made pricing structure changes possible.

None of this has to be a big conspiracy or a big change from Microsoft's acquisition. It's possible they just have a business model that's less nefarious than you're able or willing to understand.

filmgirlcw · 6 years ago

We do!

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/online/how-to/...

(I work on Azure but not on this product)

qppo · 6 years ago

I've spent the last two weeks working on provisioning scripts to make that possible for enterprise products. It's hell.

aerovistae · 6 years ago

Idk, I feel like we've been trained to believe this is necessary. Why you should need to know more about a dependency than its documented API? This sort of reminds me of Americans believing their current healthcare situation is the only way to do it even though it's awful.

cachestash · 6 years ago

The only time I could see myself using this is in the following scenario;

1. Browsing repos.

2. See a quick fix I could make (like a typo)

3. Open up the code space view, make the change, add and commit it.

For my daily needs I would never replace an online IDE with my local IDE. I see no value in doing that. My concern would be for when github has a service outage. I am without my IDE until they resolve the issue? With a local IDE I can just continue to work on my branch and push it when GH comes back online.

seph-reed · 6 years ago

I'd like to be able to contribute to Firefox or Brave, but there's no way I'm going through with the setup.

If I could just do some small stuff, maybe write some unit tests, that would be fine.

petetnt · 6 years ago

I contribute to various OSS (and private) projects all time just by using the GitHub code editor and catching errors or regressions if any in the CI. Having a fully fledged dev environment is even better.

alkonaut · 6 years ago

Most of the time when I contribute to a GH project it works like this: I use the product, discover a bug, search on their GH, don’t find it, file a new bug report, clone the source fix the bug, submit PR, never commit to the same project again.

The threshold for doing that sort of minor work can be lowered a lot by this.

dijit · 6 years ago

I was looking (at the time) for something that would allow me to develop windows applications from a Linux machine.

Sadly I'm still falling short. :<

ianwalter · 6 years ago

I just added my user settings and my custom theme via .vsix and everything seems to have worked fine. Not sure how I missed this, thanks Jan!

milanove · 6 years ago

Please drink verification can

eertami · 6 years ago

>They wanted to know how much I’d value collaborative editing in VSCode. They’re definitely thinking about it.

Thinking about it? I thought this was a feature since 2018...

https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/11/15/live-share

mailtolego · 6 years ago

If you've noticed it during the demo, the Live Share extension is preinstalled and logged in with your GitHub account, so you can start a session right away.

dkarlovi · 6 years ago

GitLab has been great for a while and actually had some features before GH.

mbreese · 6 years ago

Sourcehut would like to have a word...

https://sr.ht/

KukicAdnan · 6 years ago

Why is that a bad thing? If you found value in Azure and it solved your problem, why is that a negative?

Kipters · 6 years ago

Why? It's not like you MUST deploy on Azure

evilduck · 6 years ago

Gitlab CE, Gitea, Gogs

aprdm · 6 years ago

Doesn't gitlab fit the bill here?

lstamour · 6 years ago

Edit: I misunderstood your comment as about Azure generally and not Azure DevOps specifically. I see Azure DevOps as the “full service” version of GitHub’s slightly more “DIY” approach. DevOps can also be customized and sold by partners, consultants, I think. GitHub if anything, might move more to a “consultant network” approach. I think Microsoft is maintaining two district brands for developers, for the time being. I originally wrote:

I think there’s a clear benefit to Microsoft for GitHub to internally use Azure, but I think there’s a clear benefit to Microsoft’s developer community, GitHub and the Microsoft Partner ecosystem for GitHub to support AWS and GCP via open source, AWS Marketplace, Docker and anything else that helps ensure GitHub is useful independent of the rest of Microsoft’s services — GitHub being impartial is more important to Microsoft than the extra market share they might — might — get.

nickspag · 6 years ago

I also use Azure DevOps for work and am a recently-former MSFT person. From what I've heard from those still there, most of the new development is going towards Github Actions, which is also reflected in their staffing movements. However with GHA running on top of ADO pipeline infrastructure (public info), Microsoft's success with the strategic slow burn as OP called it, and their super-long-term-support reputation, it's probably not in their interest to rush the move. I'd be willing to bet that in a year+ or so the writing on the public wall becomes much clearer. To that extent, we've started planning a migration at my company.

nicoburns · 6 years ago

The corporate direction could be based on pricing. Azure DevOps (pay per concurrent job) can be a lot cheaper than Github Actions (pay per minute of CI time, with macOS minutes counting as 10 minutes each).

slim · 6 years ago

the end game is the developer gig economy. you assign a ticket to yourself, write the code while they analyse your behavior to calculate your hourly rate then you get paid

apozem · 6 years ago

> Don't forget about VSCode! It's very quickly becoming one of the best free editors out there

I don't know if people realize just how much market share VS Code has grabbed. It went from 7% to 50% in five years, according some some surveys [1]. Microsoft is quietly dominating this part of the stack. [2]

[1]: https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/articles/vs-code-javas...

[2]: This is not an invitation to debate the merits of VS Code or tell me which editor you use, just an observation of growth

edraferi · 6 years ago

Github CodeSpaces is explicitly VS Code. Their tagline is "Get the full Visual Studio Code experience without leaving GitHub."

coldtea · 6 years ago

>I'm actually curious, will this be using Atom, it's own thing, or VS Code as the editor backend?

Isn't it obvious? VS Code.

sq_ · 6 years ago

> replacing Sublime, Atom and the rest

Regarding Atom, I've heard some whispers around the internet that they may slowly wind it down in favor of VSCode so that Microsoft doesn't have two competing text editors. Anyone know how true that might be?

abhinavk · 6 years ago

Care to elaborate about the tons of C++ part? In their GitHub repo, I can hardly see any C++ files.

greatgib · 6 years ago

Just think! You have Github. Git coming from linux, open source World, ... Also Github is notoriously the base of a lot of the ecosystem that is deprecating Microsoft solutions and environnement. All the website and js things of today are all developped by and for the unix world(linux, mac,..). In ms World, you were supposed to use proprietary closed heavy corporate solutions : c sharp, j2e, closed 'pro' server solutions.

Si Github was the corner of all of that. Then they but it, suddenly there are a lot of features coming that bring it far from the scm job it was meant to. Now, it starts to be 'integrated' with ms tool ecosystem. How long before your Github accounts are merged, shared, replace with a Microsoft account?

They will tell you that it makes sense and is needed because vscode needs to be interconnected with ms team and co...

greatgib · 6 years ago

And btw, don't forget the past. They had 'team fondation server' (that is now azure devons server'), that was shitty and git and Github were terrible competitors.: https://wilsonmar.github.io/tfs-vs-github/

And all of tfs was volontarely deeply intricated with Visual studio useless things.

cachestash · 6 years ago

Its legacy thinking.

sytse · 6 years ago

Why wait until the end of the day on the west coast? :) We just posted https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/05/06/git-challenge/ where we encourage you to compare:

1. GitHub Insights with GitLab Insights, Contribution Analytics, Issues Analytics, Productivity Analytics, Value Stream Analytics, DevOps Score, Code Review Analytics, and CI/CD Analytics.

2. GitHub security features with GitLab Container Scanning, Dependency List, Dependency Scanning, Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), Security Dashboard, Static Application Security Testing (SAST), and Secrets Detection.

3. GitHub Codespaces with the GitLab Web IDE, CI/CD Environments, Review apps, and Live Preview.

factorialboy · 6 years ago

To be fair, nothing was announced today by GH that wasn't in GL for several years.

Perhaps the quality of VS Code trumps GL WebIDE ... But I am not the sort of developer to ditch my desktop editors / IDEs for something running in a browser (electron or otherwise).

wiredone · 6 years ago

I'm not sure this is correct. GH seems to take their time, and get things right. They're product leadership is really top tier compared to the rest of the tools providers who are often quick to release a feature half-baked hoping to iterate. I've rarely seen a GH feature that's not fully polished and "makes sense" on day 1.

They are the Apple of the dev tools space. Less is nearly always more.

curryst · 6 years ago

My view is that GitLab is more prone to feature creep. They have a lot of innovative features, but because of the number of features, most of them really only feel 90% or 95% of the way there. GitHub chooses a smaller number of features, but they feel more polished.

I don't think the feature creep is all bad. Sometimes the new features are amazingly useful, if not totally polished. It depends on what you need, and sometimes you need features that only GitLab has.

mplewis · 6 years ago

In this case, they don't. Codespaces offers a lot more functionality than the GitLab web IDE.

cmiles74 · 6 years ago

We host our own GitLab instance and it's been great. Performance is way better than the public GitLab site and it's been dependable. It would be nice to disable some of the features but, overall, everyone at my company is happy.

mcintyre1994 · 6 years ago

I agree that there are loads of open Gitlab issues, but I’ve found that their team are really easy to communicate with, really open to feedback and somehow also respond really quickly on issues. I like that they use Gitlab for so much and that they’re still really open to hearing about a workflow that’s different to theirs and keen to help with that.

As a user I really like that they have their tickets open like that. I’d never contact Github and tell them about some minor feature that would be helpful or give them feedback on a new feature they’ve released because how would you even do that in a way that’s not annoying? And with Gitlab you often get to feed in at the design stage which you’re completely shut out from anywhere else.

I’m not sure if you’ve actually had issues go missing - I know they have loads of repos and I’ve only engaged with a few - but my experience definitely hasn’t been that things get lost in the weeds.

For what it’s worth I agree with all the extra features being too visible. I kinda get it - one day I’ll get round to learning Kubernetes and I’ll probably do something with Gitlab’s integration when I do - but while I don’t use them those features are definitely too visible and add too much clutter.

enraged_camel · 6 years ago

I'm a solo developer and I disagree with everything you have said. Gitlab has been an absolute joy to use. Sure, it has a lot of features, but it's not like you are forced to use stuff you don't need. My workflow is pretty simple, yet I have never felt like I'm using a sledgehammer to kill a fly.

clenneville · 6 years ago

Thank you for your feedback!

Regarding performance, we've made some recent improvements (here's one example: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/30507#note_293...), but we know we need to do more. We're actively working to improve our sitespeed (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/issues/7154), and we have several other improvements in process this quarter.

Regarding disabling features and the Git project screen, our UX research team has heard this feedback from other users. It's fair feedback, and we're looking at how to address it.

xyst · 6 years ago

I don’t remember gitlab being this cluttered, these new features you mention must be relatively new.

Haven’t used them since they allowed an intern to purge the production database.

Kind of glad I have stuck with github thus far.

sdesol · 6 years ago

> But Gitlab is an example of a company that is moving too fast

I've studied GitLab's code history for a while, and they have been moving at a very fast pace for years now. Below is a one year window (from today) into to their gitlab repo.

https://imgur.com/HOh5Zrr

https://imgur.com/snU8UfY

https://imgur.com/DDxD3lN

Some points of interest are:

1) 15k commits are merge commits.

2) The vast majority of the code churn is ruby, which is expected.

3) Based on the bus factor, a lot of files that are iterated on, have less than 10 unique contributors. And there are a handful of files that are iterated on a lot, by a lot of people.

4) A lot of the code changes are 10 lines of churn (lines added, changed, deleted) or less, which indicates incremental improvements/bug fixes/etc., as opposed to adding new functionality.

Something that I'm not doing right now, is mapping the churn, to the number of unique contributors. It would be interesting to see if there is a pattern to their churn vs number of contributors.

GitLab is definitely moving at a very fast pace, and it would be interesting to map this to their issues, but their API is extremely slow, so I've never bothered trying.

Edit: For the scatter charts, the x-axis represents the number of files. And the y-axis is number of contributors (bus factor chart) and churn size (churn chart)

traspler · 6 years ago

Ah yes, the "Who can find the open 2y old GitLab issue for our problem" game. There is always one and it always has a couple of "This is an issue for a customer <zendesk link>" comments. At least even very old issues still get responses and seemingly are tracked somehow.

I kind of agree with the "too fast". It seems to me that many features are being created as a PoC to pad out features lists and having something new to market. It will then live on as barely useable and accumulates hundreds/thousands of issues as the devs seem to be spread way too thin over all the PoC, core and new features.

prepend · 6 years ago

The GitLab license is really tough. We use GitLab internally with about 1000 users, but only 50-100 are developers. The rest are analysts and data scientists who either edit doc files or push their R projects so other people can see them.

25 of those are willing to pay for the advanced features at $100/month, but the entire instance has to be upgraded. It’s frustrating because there’s no way to pay $100/month so 950 people can view a private repo or edit markdown.

If we could enable features for just the devs who need it, we could. The GitLab folks were nice, but the only workaround for this was to have multiple instances that people would connect to depending on their need. That’s confusing for non-devs and also many projects have a few developers but 3x as many people who just edit markdown or view CI status.

mikewhy · 6 years ago

Was this reply to the wrong comment? Cause your first line is a total non sequitur to what you're replying to. And this is definitely a space people both a) can compare (compete?) and b) MS is playing catchup to (albeit with a great advantage).

troycarlson · 6 years ago

My thoughts:

* Some teams do this already with git data...but if it's free as part of a team's development platform then maybe the less sophisticated managers who don't know how to interpret the data will misuse it?

* If the editor is heavily instrumented then even more granular "productivity" metrics could be extracted, like time spent with the tab active, etc. which aren't available with a vanilla install of other editors. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

yarrel · 6 years ago

You give managers too much credit.

novok · 6 years ago

It would live in your own personal instance, just like how a lot of company confidential data lives in google docs and gmail today.

cheapsteak · 6 years ago

Do you have link to the developer productivity analytics? Or is it stuck in video form at the moment? Very curious

booleandilemma · 6 years ago

Do I get points for deleting lines of code?

ccktlmazeltov · 6 years ago

I've never seen this in any languages that I use (obviously Java is not in that list), is there a list somewhere?

mr_toad · 6 years ago

> Microsoft is pushing for a future with dumb terminals and online services.

I wish they’d up their game then. The cloud versions of Word and Excel are missing numerous important features.

marviel · 6 years ago

I think you're looking for Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

AlphaWeaver · 6 years ago

GitHub's editor is useful for simple fixes, (formatting, markdown, typos,) but Codespaces seems extremely useful in building a reproducible dev environment for more complex packages / projects, including build tooling!

throwaway43423 · 6 years ago

There's a very big difference between editing a file in a textbox and editing a file in an IDE pre-configured to have all the correct dependencies, extensions, build&test scripts, intellisense, etc.

baby · 6 years ago

You still have to fork

adamparsons · 6 years ago

I feel like even with one-line fixes, having the tests run before committing (to see the CI/CD results instead) would give people a lot more confidence in making those changes.

Personally speaking, I'd be worried that I end up making 15 commits to get everything right and the history in that PR would be slightly embarrassing. Having the live linting, intellisense and tests makes pushing a single commit a lot easier.

TheAceOfHearts · 6 years ago

The edit button is perfect for fixing typos; I don't think I've ever even used it for any other purpose. Tidying-up typos up as you're passing through is a small way in which anyone can help contribute! It's like picking up pieces of trash as you're strolling through a park.

geokon · 6 years ago

a bit of a noob question. I'd love to be able to tweak code on the spot. Like I'm showing something to my boss and he wants something quickly adjusted, I write a couple lines, commit and then with Github Actions I get back an updated executable immediately

But I feel like things are set up explicitly to not work this way. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but can you trigger a rebuild of a prerelease?

It seems you need to setup a new tag and a new release version to ever get a rebuild. There are explicitly no official Actions for updating releases. A new release for a one line change seems a bit crazy (and you'll get a huge clutter of releases which is confusing for users)

I tried to ask and was told it's maybe possible if you write an action yourself .. yikes https://github.community/t5/GitHub-Actions/What-s-the-canoni...

mgalgs · 6 years ago

Yeah, where this gets really interesting is in the integration with the project's build system, CI, and test environments.

I'm envisioning a project with a full automated build and test suite with an on-demand staging environment for each change (the k8s docs project does this, at least it did the last time I chucked a typo PR over the wall).

With proper integration to the editor you could have an extremely slick dev environment instantly available for any casual passerby. Once implemented, this would greatly simplify maintainers' lives as well!

nerdponx · 6 years ago

That seems outside of the scope of an in-browser text editor...

lukevp · 6 years ago

Why not post the change here so someone else could contribute it? Sounds useful.

sally1620 · 6 years ago

Technical advancements are always held back by politics. This is one of the main advantages of GPL, there is no CLA to sign.

antigirl · 6 years ago

Absolutely, just might not be for everyone. Installing running those modules is gonna cost them. node_modules for create-react-app, react official boiler plate is around 280mb