Facebook and Microsoft partner for remote development

Facebook has announced that Visual Studio Code, the source code editor developed by Microsoft, will be the company's default development environment. In the future, Facebook will work with Microsoft to expand the remote development extension for Visual Studio Code so that engineers can do large-scale remote development.

Facebook and Microsoft Partnering on Remote Development
https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2019/11/19/facebook-microsoft-partnering-remote-development/

Facebook engineers have written millions of lines of code, but until now the default development environment was not specified, so developers are using Vim , using Emacs , The development environment was disjointed, such as using 'Nuclide', an integrated development environment developed by Facebook.

Nuclide, which has been developed by Facebook, is a development environment that started with an open source package set built on the text editor Atom and has been developed to support multiple programming languages used within Facebook. In 2018, the open source version of Nuclide was abolished, but it continued to be used within Facebook.

However, Facebook announced to internal engineers that it will move Nuclide to Visual Studio Code in the second half of 2018. By using the extension function, part of Nuclide's functions have been migrated to Visual Studio Code, and there are also results, and at the time of writing the article, many engineers are using Visual Studio Code inside Facebook .

Nuclide's official website has stopped updating since the announcement of “Abolition of Open Source Version” was announced.

Retiring the Nuclide Open Source Project | Nuclide

As for why Facebook chose Microsoft's Visual Studio Code as its default development environment, “Visual Studio Code is a very popular development tool that has received significant investment and support from the open source community as well as Microsoft. It also supports macOS, Windows, and Linux, and has a robust and well-defined extension API that allows you to build the key features needed for large-scale development within Facebook. Code can safely leave the future of the development platform. '

Visual Studio Code – Code Editor | Microsoft Azure

Facebook has announced an alliance with Microsoft for remote development, creating an environment where its engineers can make remote development smoother. Facebook engineers install Visual Studio Code on a local PC, but the actual development is done directly on the development server in the data center. Therefore, it aims to improve efficiency and productivity by making the code on the server accessible in a seamless and high-performance manner.

Facebook expects that using Visual Studio Code's remote extensions will provide many benefits, even in a more advanced development environment than the normal use case. Facebook has partnered with Microsoft to specifically “make it work on specialized hardware that is larger, faster than what is available on local machines”, “mixed or competing” Create a dedicated development environment tailored to each project's specific dependencies without worrying about configuration errors, 'multiple developments in progress without affecting the performance of local resources and tools The goal is to realize the flexibility to quickly switch environments.

Also, Facebook said that it has continued its efforts to make Visual Studio Code an integrated development environment that can be used internally, and specifically, because Facebook uses various programming languages, It lists the development of extensions to support it.

In addition, because Facebook uses Mercurial as the source control infrastructure, it is also working on the development of extensions to allow direct source control operations within Visual Studio Code.

Facebook said, “Visual Studio Code has become part of Facebook's future development. Partnering with Microsoft makes us part of a community that helps Visual Studio Code remain a world-class development tool. I am very much looking forward to it. '