Visual Studio Code version 1.72 (September 2022 update) brings several improvements

What’s new and improved in Visual Studio Code version 1.72 (September 2022 Update)

Engineering Updates

Towards “cross origin isolation”

We have made changes to enable cross origin isolation for VS Code desktop and vscode.dev. This will enable new powerful features like shared array buffers. Both VS Code itself and also extensions and webviews will benefit from this.

Cross origin isolation is currently behind a feature flag and enabling it might have unwanted effects on extensions and webviews that load resources from the internet. You can read more about this in Why you need “cross-origin isolated” for powerful features. We would like to hear your feedback early.

Improved startup performance

We reserved engineering time this milestone to improve the startup time it takes from launching VS Code to seeing a blinking cursor in the text editor. We always keep track of our performance numbers and noticed a slight degradation at the end of last milestone that we wanted to address.

This was a team effort where everyone was contributing various changes throughout the source code. A couple of highlights are mentioned here.

Faster PR checks

For pull requests, we run automatic unit, integration, and smoke testing. All this happens in parallel but each step requires that our TypeScript sources are transpiled into JavaScript code. Originally, we used the TypeScript compiler for this. It emits JavaScript but also does type checking. The latter is time consuming and for testing not really needed. The overall time cost, by which testing was delayed, was around 5 minutes. We then switched to a custom transpile-only solution that uses the TypeScript compiler API. This was much faster but still took around 2 minutes.