Discussion on: Debugging Ruby in VS Code

[Dāvis Namsons]

There seems to be a lack of people interested in developing extensions for Ruby in the VS Code community. I am currently learning some TypeScript to remedy that a bit as it seems like most Ruby extensions are slowly dying from the lack of contributions. I really like VS Code, it really is a shame that Microsoft isn't maintaining Ruby like they are maintaining Python/Go/etc. I might even go over to being a vim purist if this goes on(let's hope not)
What features are you lacking compared to atom if i may ask?

[Andy Zhao (he/him)]

Totally agree with the sentiment that there's a lack of interest in developing Ruby extensions.

I'm not too sure which features I miss from Atom since it's been almost a year since I last used it. I think my major issue with VS Code + Ruby is the slow development of features I expect to be working, like Solargraph or proper syntax highlighting. The latter might be an issue with my theme though.

Since you mentioned vim, I wonder what most Rubyists use for their text editor.

[Dāvis Namsons]

It's not just the theme, the problem really lies with the lexer for tokenization of the Ruby syntax, for example:

def method(argument)
  puts argument
end

method argument

This is a valid and widely used way to call a method with just one argument(if I'm not mistaken, RuboCop's default config even throws a warning if parentheses are used), but as you can see, it doesn't get highlighted correctly.

I stumbled across this research by JetBrains a few days ago, it has the statistics of preferred editors for Ruby developers amongst other things.