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Fair warning, this is a rough draft rant that I threw together, because my thoughts are too long for a tweet or Mastodon post. Maybe I'll post this as a thread too. For now, it'll be up on spv.sh/txt.

The title is the tl;dr. If you want an explanation as to why, continue reading.

Medusa started as a project because I wanted a debugger for ARMv7. Over time, it evolved into a project to create a full SRE & HW research suite as well as an IDE. I've been perfectly happy writing the code for Medusa in VSCode. To be honest, VSCode is perfectly fine for my needs. The only 2 things I don't like about it are:

  1. it's from Microsoft
  2. it's an Electron app

As for 1, VSCodium exists. For those who don't know, VSCodium is essentially VSCode without all of Microsoft's proprietary additions -- "virgin" VSCode, if you will. I don't actually currently use VSCodium, but it shows that you can get the benefits of VSCode without using a proprietary application.

As for 2, if we're honest, does it really fucking matter? I mean, yeah, I dislike the inefficiency, and there certainly are climate arguments about the waste of Electron apps. But for developer tools that aren't really end-user oriented, does it really matter?

I don't really know whether it's worth it to continue working on Medusa when I may be better served by VSCod(e/ium) with a custom extension (that I'll obviously release) to add a good debugger, hex editor, disassembler, decompiler, etc. Why re-invent the wheel, you know? Maybe I should just add to the VSCod(e/ium) eco-system.

There may be some ethical implications of adding to Microsoft's eco-system, but, if I pretend to be a "good guy" now, I'll be even more hypocritical than I usually am -- ethics doesn't tend to concern me much, lol.

So, idk. Maybe I'll post a poll on Mastodon (@spv@spv.sh) or (less likely) Twitter (@__spv). Maybe I'll keep working on Medusa, maybe not. Maybe I'll migrate some of my goals to a VSCode extension, maybe not. I don't fucking know right now, lmao.

If you have any thoughts, you can reach out to me on Mastodon, (@spv@spv.sh), or, if you want, email me @ spv@spv.sh.

Cheers everyone, I love y'all.

~ spv
  embrace the chaos

note: this blog post was "imported", so to speak, from my text files section — formatting has been updated to fit Markdown.