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What underlying technologies/libraries is Microsoft's new (free) cross platform editor Visual Studio Code (Launched 5/29/2015) built on? There are rumors that it's just Github's Atom Editor rebranded.
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Microsoft Visual Studio is an IDE made by Microsoft and used for different types of software development such as computer programs, websites, web apps, web services, and mobile apps. It contains completion tools, compilers, and other features to facilitate the software development process.
Answer: Not exactly. The technology that is found in GitHub's open-source editor – Atom is the same in the Visual Studio Code. Specifically, the Electron Shell project. Microsoft has incorporated additional features in the Visual Studio Code that you will not in Atom like Intelli-Sense support.
What Microsoft didn't say when announcing the new editor was how it built Visual Studio Code. In a move that might seem a little surprising, given the regular animosity between the two companies, the editor is built on top of Chromium, the open source version of Google's Chrome browser.
The Monaco Editor is the code editor which powers VS Code, with the features better described here.
Visual Studio Code is built using web technologies on top of Github's Electron.
Electron is an app runtime for writing native apps that uses Chromium (which Google Chrome is built on) for rendering the interface and node.js for local APIs (example: file system access), it was built primarily as the shell for Github's Atom code editor. (Note: Electron is very similar to NW.js).
Node.js is a (JavaScript) app runtime built on Google's V8 JavaScript engine with C and C++ code to give it access to native APIs for each operating system (example: file system access).
Essentially, Microsoft's new product is built completely upon open source software whose major components were created by Google.
There are rumors that Visual Studio code is either a fork or rebranding of Github's Atom Editor. This is not even remotely true. Inspecting the source of Visual Studio Code reveals that it uses Electron and Atom Shell Archive, but nothing else is from the Atom editor.
The 'editor' (the thing that renders the code with syntax highlighting, line numbers, etc..) part of Visual Studio Code is Microsoft's Monaco editor. It is the same editor used for OneDrive, Windows Azure, TypeScript Playground, and Visual Studio Online. I have yet to find any real documentation on this editor from Microsoft but there are some articles about it around the web.
Omnisharp is used to provide IntelliSense and other code editing tools for C# (example: refactoring).
The JavaScript Intellisense appears to be all custom code. It provides impressive JavaScript completions but it many cases it appears to be inferior to Tern (see Tern Demo).
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