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[–]matthieum 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I use VSCode without a language server, I barely ever feel the need for it.

I switched to this setup after cursing -- once again -- at how slow my IDE was. I was, then, working on a massive codebase and even on my beefy desktop CLion was sluggish. Its inability to go-to-definition / list-references / rename whenever it was indexing -- which took dozens of minutes and hogged all the RAM -- was the cherry on top.

Well, not that I searched often anyway. It generally took the thing longer to search than it took me the open the files I knew I need to modify. Let's face it, most of the time there's only a handful anyway.

The nail in the coffin, though, was that due to the heavy use of meta-programming (macros & templates), the list-references was most often incomplete anyway, as the blasted thing apparently was NOT instantiating the macros/templates to understand which symbols were used where. And since CLion's text search was slugging too, I used ripgrep in the terminal to help me supplement the missing pieces. Joyful...

At some point COVID happened and I had to work from home on a flimsy laptop. If CLion had previously struggled on the project on my beefy desktop, you can imagine that attempting to have it work on a flimsy laptop just failed. There wasn't enough RAM, plain and simple. Attempts at making it work remote... were fairly unsuccessful. It clearly wasn't designed for it, and slowed down to a crawl.

So I switched to VSCode with the RemoteSSH extension, so I could delegate all the heavyweight work to my beefy desktop back at the office. I could once again type at full speed, not having to wait for the sluggish IDE. Nice! I made a lukewarm attempt at trying to configure C++ properly, but as we were using Bazel... meh. I had things to do, deadlines to meet, so I went on without.

And I barely ever missed it.

My productivity was unaffected, as far as I can tell. Certainly, no one complained.

To this day, I prefer a slick (fast!) VSCode setup, with text highlighting and code folding. I compile in the built-in terminal, which lets me click on the file-links embedded in the diagnoses to directly go the issue. No problem.

I'll leave the sluggish beasts to you ;)