After Slowness Complaints, Microsoft Boosts Code Completion in VS Code Java Tooling -- Visual Studio Magazine

After Slowness Complaints, Microsoft Boosts Code Completion in VS Code Java Tooling

By David Ramel
07/03/2023

Microsoft's June update to its Java tooling in Visual Studio Code focuses on enhancing code completion performance, improving user experience in unit testing and project creation, and introducing new project types.

Here's a rundown of those three focus points from the team, which manages the Extension Pack for Java in the code editor's marketplace.

**[Click on image for larger view.]** Java Extension Pack (Preview) *(source: Microsoft).*

Code Completion Performance Improvement
The dev team responded to user complaints about slow code completion by researching how to speed it up. Preliminary results indicate a notable reduction in latency, with version 1.19 pre-release demonstrating significant improvements compared to version 1.16. Specifically, the results show latency reductions ranging from 32 percent to 56 percent under varied experiences.

The team will more fully discuss the results in a later post and plans a series of performance updates to be enacted over the next few months.

Support for postDebugTask in Test Runner for Java
The Test Runner for Java, one of the individual extensions in the Java Extension Pack, now includes support for the postDebugTask attribute. This new feature allows developers to launch a task at the end of a debug session, which can help with performing cleanup tasks after unit testing, such as database cleanups. Developers can configure the task in the Settings.json and Tasks.json files to improve the overall testing experience.

Introduction of New Project Types in Project Manager
Thanks to community contributions, the Project Manager for Java can now create Micronaut and Graal Cloud Native Projects using either the command palette (Java: Create Java Project) or the dedicated "Create Java Project" button, providing appropriate corresponding extensions are installed.

Extension Pack for Java
Still in the preview stage, this bundles six tools together, ranging from language support provided by a Red Hat extension to offerings for debugging, testing, IntelliCode and more. It has been installed some 20.3 million times, earning an average 3.9 rating (0-5 scale) from 62 developers who reviewed it.

More information can be found in the "Java on Visual Studio Code -- June 2023" blog post published June 29.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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