Microsoft has updated its popular open source code editor Visual Studio Code to work natively on Apple Silicon. Last year, Apple announced that the Mac will be transitioning from Intel to Apple made in-house chips. The transition will take two years but developers have already begun or in some cases finished reworking their apps for the new platform.
To make the transition easier on users and developers, Apple announced Rosetta 2 – a translation layer which will allow Intel apps to run on the new Apple Silicon chips. While the translation software does a decent job at making sure the apps run properly and also does not deteriorate the speed much, a native app is always preferred. Native apps run smoothly without any issues while being efficient in power consumption and run faster.
No need of Rosetta 2 anymore
The new version of Visual Studio Code (popularly referred to as VSCode) 1.54 is the first to support Apple Silicon natively. It is the first consumer release of the editor, however users were allowed to use beta versions of the same prior to the final release. As a result, the new version of Visual Studio Code will not use the Rosetta 2 translation layer.
We are happy to announce our first release of stable Apple Silicon builds this iteration. Users on Macs with M1 chips can now use VS Code without emulation with Rosetta, and will notice better performance and longer battery life when running VS Code. Thanks to the community for self-hosting with the Insiders build and reporting issues early in the iteration.
Apple released its first slew of Mac computers powered by Apple Silicon in November last year. At the ‘Special Event’, the company unveiled the M1 chip – the first ARM based chip for consumer Mac computers. It powers the MacBook Air, the 13” base MacBook Pro, and the Mac mini.
