Looking at the bio it seems like the creator is just an university student. That's crazy impressive! I thought an app of this level of polish would require at least a small team of experienced devs/designers.
Very cool. We (Sourcegraph) could never get VS Code fast enough to be the right fit for code browsing and search, which is what we're targeting. So we built our own components (open-source at https://github.com/sourcegraph/codeintellify). For browsing and search, you need fast loading, low resource consumption, a native system feel for text, etc.
For editing in the browser, where you're likely to keep one tab open for a long time, it is an absolutely obvious choice. A huge undertaking for sure, and it's awesome that he was able to accomplish it!
Theia IDE folks are working on this as well. They have a very similar project/product. I'm curious how much of the work is overlapping...
The SourceGraph folks seemed to have been one of the first to get major chunks of VSCode running in browser. I've stumbled across a few others doing similar things but they seemed like toys.
I used to be a major contributor and follower of Atom. People commonly asked why Atom couldn't run in the browser. The answer was simple, node and a browser are totally different things. Imagine a browser opening files, starting processes, running arbitrary C-code, etc.
What everyone else has been doing is embedding Monaco (the barebones text editor component) into their shell. The shell implements things like searches, key bindings, a file explorer tree view, top menu, fake-console etc.
What the creator is saying is that he got the actual VSCode project running in the browser. This means that the vast plugin ecosystem will run inside the browser. I suppose he'd have replaced all the nodejs dependencies with browser versions; for example an "fs" module that keeps files in-memory (or maybe using indexeddb) etc.
Further down that tweet, he says that the code is very easy to get started with. That's been my experience looking at it briefly; VSCode just seems like it was written by a team with deep expertise in IDE-making and PLs.
https://twitter.com/CompuIves/status/1031930891122049024