Adding support for your language to Visual Studio Code
Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a popular IDE. It has been chosen to illustrate adding support for your language to an existing IDE because of its market share, but this is not an endorsement. For your language, you may find that another IDE is far easier to support, or far better for your users. Personally, I am an Emacs person, and I won’t become interested in VS Code until someone demonstrates it running in Emacs mode. However, VS Code does have a lot of nice features.
VS Code knows how to display programs written in many programming languages, such as Java, out of the box. How it colors Java syntax depends on the selected color theme, but under the Black High Contrast, you get a very colorful display. It is unclear what colors mean in VS Code or how colors are assigned to different bits of the code, but hey—many pretty pastel shades of blue, green, pink, and orange are used. Figure 10.2 shows a...