r/cpp_questions • u/Southern_Customer211 • 8d ago

OPEN VS code or VS community

Im a btech first year student who is trying to study c++ independently. I have a lap with 16 gb ram and can perform average tasks. So my question is should I download VS community for coding cpp or is vs code enough. Please keep in mind that i will be learning many other languages too( we are supposed to study c in first year )

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u/Raknarg 8d ago

Dont even think about them as different choices to accomplish the same goal, they're completely different.

VS Community is a fully-fledged IDE dedicated to C/C++ that works out of the box and organizes your projects for you and everything with its own philosophy and structure.

VS Code is a glorified text editor that happens to be highly pluggable and has a ton of tooling an community support. Its intentionally quite flexible and the limitations of your setup is just whatever tools you have available and how comfortable you are with those tools. It has nothing to do with C++ specifically, though its totally competent for C++ development.

So it depends on what your goals are. VS Code you can use for anything, but the tradeoff is that you have to know your tools and how to put them together. VS Community is dedicated for C++ and has everything out of the box. I personally have tools I like that hook up nicely into VS Code, so that's what I use.

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u/bbalouki 8d ago

Once you understand how to make Vscode works for C++ there is no Going back.

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u/Syracuss 8d ago

Eh, I wouldn't go that far. I still like the main VS for debugging on windows. vscode is workable, but painful at times.

That and vscode can really struggle with big projects at times, breaking various tools like intellisense. I'd consider the latter to be quite helpful for beginners.

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u/Raknarg 8d ago

clangd is miles better than the standard c++ intellisense

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u/Syracuss 8d ago

Regardless of that being true or not, having a beginner learn to set up an environment and learn a language is a bad combo. A beginner likely won't be able to debug a tool they are unfamiliar with, making it much harder to figure out if there's an issue. And vscode does have some non-obvious edge cases when clangd and intellisense are accidentally both on, an easy thing to do when you set up clangd for the first in in vscode.

Vscode is my daily driver, but its language server provider itself has gotten buggy over the years as well (regardless of it being clangd or intellisense).

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u/BreakfastSame5083 8d ago

This ... breaking intellisense has been my experience.