Adding VS Code to Pi

pi/

This has pretty much been done to death: those who don't want it have probably installed it already while those who don't will have made sure the M$ repo isn't in their sources.list because apparently lookups are slow.

So, why have you brought it up again?

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--   
Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

I think the guy is talking about the VSCode, a code editor/light weight ide.

I have used it a little to develop code for the rpi, it looks promising. However I develop on the PC and run the produced code on a headless rpi, as opposed to running VSCode native on a rpi desktop.

Yes, I wondered why anyone would actually write code on an RPi. Anyone who really wants to use VS rather than, say, emacs, will surely want to use the real thing on its native Windows, and cross-compile.

The Pi4 is now fairly powerful, but that's in comparison to phones and earlier Pis, not compared to a recent workstation or expensive laptop.

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Joe

Compared to most of the machines I've developed software on the Pi4 is a supercomputer! It makes the finest workstation ever produced by Sun, Apollo or even SGI look like a toy. It is a sad testimony to bloat that you find it inadequate to run an IDE.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:\>WIN                                     | A better way to focus the sun 
The computer obeys and wins.                |    licences available see 
You lose and Bill collects.                 |    http://www.sohara.org/

VSCode, I would not run on a slow Pi with limited memory. Unless it's a small project.

The interface features intellisence features that in the background may cause foreground sluggishness, if you are strapped for memory. Could say typical bloated microsoft, but worthwhile persevering with. The built-in Git support is really good.

capable. Lenovo make really nice tiny PC things like the M73, M710q etc....

I mentioned the

project (as it's VSCode based, but open source). I actually run that on a M73 (Core i3 2.9GHz), and can access and code on it fast on anything that runs a web browser.

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Adrian C

You can get 8GB on a Pi4, if that's not enough then it's a very sad testimonial to bloat - some of the workstations we all used to lust after had as much as a thousandth of that much memory.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:\>WIN                                     | A better way to focus the sun 
The computer obeys and wins.                |    licences available see 
You lose and Bill collects.                 |    http://www.sohara.org/

Joe in data 13/2/2021 09:49 ha scritto:

VS Code is Electron based, so I'm not so sure we can define it native on Windows.

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Tilt

Yeah, I'm sure we cannot. Joe may be confusing Visual Studio (the Windows IDE) and Visual Studio Code (the multiplatform, Electron-based editor).

I didn't say that. Given a choice of development environments, I would not expect the PI, even a 4, to be preferred.

Not that I've done any ARM coding for more than forty years.

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Joe

EMACS: 'Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping' was once the byword for bloat. Looks like there is a new pretender to the crown.

Anyone have any recommendations for modern open-source GUI editors that

*don't* use Electron as a framework? I've been trying out Onivim but interested in others.

Theo

ARM is only about 30 years old?

Having said that my Arm code looks remarkably similar to my x64 code, I try not to let a different OS or CPU get in the way of my uniformity. I let other people to worry about that.

Split the difference - ARM goes back to 1985, 36 years old.

-- Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see You lose and Bill collects. |

Sorry, yes, it was 32 years ago. Memory failing...

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Joe

It's ok, as long as you don't tell me you had an Archimedes. Even 32 years on the jealousy is still real and I would have to hate you.

First ARM design 1983, first silicon 1985. So I take 38 ;-)

Cough.

Depends what you mean by Archimedes, but I probably have about eight.

Theo

32 years ago there weren't many options, Archimedes (just out), BBC co-proc, involved at the start of Newton.

The Archimedes was special though, it was so much more powerful than anything else on the market short of high end (read eye wateringly expensive) workstations. There's never been anything so outstanding since.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:\>WIN                                     | A better way to focus the sun 
The computer obeys and wins.                |    licences available see 
You lose and Bill collects.                 |    http://www.sohara.org/

I never owned an Archimedes - I came in at the A3000, which was after Acorn had stopped using the Archimedes trademark. But my main desktop is a Raspberry Pi running RISC OS. This build is just over a month old, which reminds me it's time I updated it again.

David

A weekly update is better - there have been and are quite a lot of security holes being discovered and fixed recently.

My personal recommendation: turn off any automatic updates you might have configured and every week make a backup using rsync [1] followed immediately by a Raspbian update and reboot.

[1] use rsync because its about the fastest backup program. On an RPi using a SD filing on an 8-18GB card system you may as well back up everything, but really, all you need to backup is /home *provided that* you keep copies of every file you change in /etc in a special directory structure in /home or in your usual login.

I use a pair of 1TB WD Essentials portable USB drives for two generations of backups, but of course ymmv - you can equally use a couple of SD cards, but they may fail silently - while a portable SSD or HDD is more likely to give you warnings, particularly if you fsck it as the last action in every backup run. Note:

- Write a shell script to automate the backup process - makes life a lot easier

- Using a set of biggish backup devices and makes it easy to back up several systems onto a single device set of HDDS or SSDs.

- Always keep the backup set offline, preferably in a firesafe or in a separate building or garden shed.

-- Martin | martin at Gregorie | gregorie dot org

I've actually got a 8GB pi 4 standing by for something. Completely forgot what.... (whoops)

if that's not enough then it's a very sad

True. Think though the safest minimum now is to have some sort of source control system while ye are hacking, or continuous backup and some 'order'

In the early days I didn't have that, and lived (in the "dev" land of MS Access) with many backups to removable media. Zip 100 disks were my mainstay for going off-network, wasn't posh enough then for getting down with MS Visual SourceSafe.

-&-

I recently abandoned running VScode on a development machine that had

2GB available for the process. Slow, like molasses ...

The project was coding in PHP for a remote application server that would be eventually a documentation search engine (Apache Solr).

Then when I found that the Debian app server had some spare memory doing nothing, I hosted VScode over there as well and neatly exported X11 window "frames" back to the dev machine, which to all purposes looked perfectly integrated into its Debian desktop.

Even better, I can host those X11 windows over VPN to other desktops remote, like them in the pre-covid office which I badly miss these days ...

But that was life before I found Theia, now I just use a browser.

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Adrian C