Mind explaining how this works?

[stevefan1999-personal]

I'm very infatuated by this beautiful lovely thing but I found nobody had explained how it works onto at first! My gut feeling is that code-server simply reuses the frontend part of Code (e.g. the GUI part from Electron), and port each and every API calls into RPCs and is ultimately processed in a central server then re-signaled to the frontend.

I know I should have had RTFC since the code is right there but it would be better if we can have a much tl;dr feel.

[NGTmeaty]

Not sure if what @GAILBTC64 said was related but we should get maybe a more technical explainer in the readme.

[kylecarbs]

@NGTmeaty I agree. We can def make that.

The inner workings are a bit complex. A very small amount of refactoring of the VS Code source had to occur. We did lots of work with webpack fills and overriding of functions to make everything work together. One part that was quite difficult is the single binary. It was very important to us that the installation required absolutely minimal setup.

VS Code has some great architecture that allowed this to happen without ripping everything apart.

[sr229]

@stevefan1999-personal from what I can deduce, this is what they did:

basically the VSCode source is modified to run specifically for web browsers, seeing VSCode is already a web app itself, this is relatively easy by removing all reliances on Electron. VSCode's backend also runs with RPC (everything is done via Language Server for lang support that has it) which means we only need to serve the frontend via a HTTP Server along with a Websocket to perform requests such as opening files and modifying them, and delegating messages back and forth from Frontend to Backend.

[code-asher]

This will be more fully addressed in #417.