US Code has a growing range of users outside of professional developers.
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Microsoft Code Editor Visual Studio Code (US Code) is only five years old, but the developer tool has impressively adopted the world’s development population.
US Code today has 14 million users, reports Microsoft (according to Statista, there are about 24 million developers worldwide), and gained five million new users in the course of 2020 due to a growing variety of users outside of professional developers and the need for remote development during the COVID-19 pandemic. In June last year, Microsoft said that US Code has 11 million users. The success is built on GitHub, Electron, Chromium, JavaScript and Microsoft’s JavaScript superset, TypeScript.
Julia Liuson, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s developer division, reckons the growth in the adoption of US code has come because people outside of professional developers are increasingly finding the need to use the editor.
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“Traditionally we have only seen professional developers, but we see a very broad set of users – people who do DevOps, people who do IT administration, we see a lot of students using the tools,” Liuson told ZDNet.
Since it’s a text editor, people do not even need to know how to code the software. Even some journalists use US Code to write stories, according to Liuson.
“The US Code strategy is really to support our any, any, any strategy. You can be a developer who works with any programming language, works on any operating system and develops any kind of software.”
US Code is running on macOS, Windows 10 and various distributions of Linux, it supports Arm64 on Linux and is used on Raspberry Pi and Chromebooks. It’s also available in a preview form for the insider collection of US code on Apple’s M1 chips on the arm.
Part of the popularity of US Code is the range of language extensions for C ++, C #, Python and various Python libraries for data scientists, Java and JavaScript / Typescript.
“When we started US Code, we followed this approach where we really wanted to lead where most demand is. We have a very strict integration of US Code and TypeScript. US Code is built on TypeScript. But we have invested a lot in language extensions , ”Liuson said.
“We have nearly two million Python developers using US Code and more than a million C ++ developers using US Code. And even our Java usage is about one million.”
GitHub, the code-sharing website Microsoft acquired in 2018, is also central to the company’s open development processes for some products such as US Code, Typescript, and some of its rejuvenated retro software such as PowerToys.
Liuson also spoke about Microsoft’s inward-looking approach to software development. The company doubled its internal resource in 2019 and recently highlighted its in-source approach as a factor that reduced the threat of SolarWinds hackers gaining access to its source code.
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Microsoft has not coined the term inner source, and the approach means the use of open source development practices and application within one organization. GitHub and GitHub’s Enterprise Server fit well with this approach to helping organizations work together, but do so privately.
“Inner source means if you have private IP, but you invite other teams in the enterprise to work with you. This is the fundamental difference between open source and inner source. It’s very common in large enterprises today – there are too many silos. – but in the micro-service architecture you sometimes have to troubleshoot a problem, ‘said Liuson. “This is when you think about using the open source model within the enterprise context, with the right permissions. To me, it’s not that different from how people collaborate on SharePoint, Word documents or G Suite. ”
Liuson says the US Code feature called Live Share, launched in 2017, is gaining “acceptance” due to WFH practices, while Microsoft is investing heavily in IntelliCode, its AI-powered code completion feature. IntelliCode is an extension for US code and it supports code completion for TypeScript and JavaScript, Python, Java, C ++, C # and Java.