VS Code team member here. The diagram in the article is a little wrong, but the basics of it are:
- The "main process" which manages the windows (renderer processes)
- The renderer process" contains the UI thread for each window, the renderer process can have its own worker threads
- The extension host loads extensions in proc, extensions are free to create their own threads/processes. The separate process for extensions protects extensions from freezing the renderer
- Various other processes that live off either the main process or the "shared process", such as the pty host for terminals which enables the terminal reconnection feature when reloading a window (also file watcher, search process)
We've been shuffling where processes are launched from recently but the actual processes and their purpose probably won't change. You can view a process tree via Help > Open Process Explorer to help understand this better.
Off topic: Is there a document/blog/article somewhere about the plugin architecture of VS Code? I'm less interested in developing a plugin (which google results usually yield) and more interested in, say, how VS Code determines the order in which plugins are called.
You could look up activation events on the website, I don't think we guarantee anything relating to order other than that. Generally the order in which they're activated shouldn't matter in practice.
- The "main process" which manages the windows (renderer processes)
- The renderer process" contains the UI thread for each window, the renderer process can have its own worker threads
- The extension host loads extensions in proc, extensions are free to create their own threads/processes. The separate process for extensions protects extensions from freezing the renderer
- Various other processes that live off either the main process or the "shared process", such as the pty host for terminals which enables the terminal reconnection feature when reloading a window (also file watcher, search process)
We've been shuffling where processes are launched from recently but the actual processes and their purpose probably won't change. You can view a process tree via Help > Open Process Explorer to help understand this better.
EDIT: Formatting