I rebuilt VS Code on Tauri instead of Electron and just open-sourced it
VS Code is an incredible editor. But every install ships a full copy of Chromium and Node.js. 775MB installed. On a machine running multiple dev tools, that adds up fast. I wanted to know what happ...

Source: DEV Community
VS Code is an incredible editor. But every install ships a full copy of Chromium and Node.js. 775MB installed. On a machine running multiple dev tools, that adds up fast. I wanted to know what happens if you rip all of that out and rebuild it on Tauri. So I did. The result is SideX. 31MB installed. Same VS Code codebase. Different runtime. What this actually is This isn't a "VS Code inspired" toy editor. This is the actual VS Code source tree: 5,687 TypeScript files 335 CSS files 82 bundled language extensions All running on Tauri v2 with a Rust backend instead of Electron. Zero Electron imports remaining in the codebase. Tauri uses your OS's native webview (WebKit on macOS, WebView2 on Windows) instead of shipping its own Chromium. That one architectural change is responsible for most of the size difference. What the Rust backend does The Tauri side isn't a thin wrapper. It's 49 commands across 9 modules: Terminal - real PTY via portable-pty (replaces node-pty) Git - 17 commands: stat