New VS Code release hits stable channel for everyone who's not on Apple Silicon after last-minute bug found

Electron 11, source control tweaks, plus general spit and polish

Microsoft has pushed out another update to dev favourite Visual Studio Code, but opted to hold off on the Apple Silicon version after a last-minute bug reared its head.

Those running Insider versions of the code wrangler on Apple hardware have access to three flavours: x64 for Intel-powered Macs, arm64 for Apple Silicon or universal, which should work natively on either.

The universal option is a larger download since it includes code for both kinds of chip.

Microsoft gave a nod to Electron 11 in the efforts to fully support Apple Silicon, but opted not to push builds aimed at the hardware to the Stable channel this around, citing a V8 crash "when loading wasm in extension host" – the Javascript engine, it seems, is having something of a bad week all around.

The investigation into the issue is interesting to follow, and a reflection of the openness of Visual Studio Code development when compared to that of the Windows Insider team, which yanked this week's Dev Channel build after a mystery spanner was thrown into the works.

Far be it from us to express delight that such "quality gates" exist in the Window OS world. The poor things must have been flapping open when the infamous Windows 10 Update of The Damned shipped back in 2018.

As for Visual Studio Code, other updates include the wrapping of tabs (rather than a scrollbar) in the workbench, some extra confirmation dialogs, better emmet performance, and some polishing of the iconography.

Source control has also been improved. A new Git command has been added to open all modified and untracked files and a warning comes up when an attempt is made to pull or resync a current branch that looks like it has been rebased.

Other tweaks have been made to performance and navigation in notebooks, and the team has lifted the restriction on only one debug session being permitted from a launch configuration.

Finally, the team noted that this milestone concluded the exploration to bundle Electron 11 into VS Code. "This is a major Electron release and comes with Chromium 87.0.4280.141 and Node.js 12.18.3." ®