Environment Setup

Welcome to the first page with subheadings! 🎉

This part of the guide will walk you through setting up the Python and Rust development environments across Windows, macOS and Linux. This stage of the guide will only take around 10-15 minutes to get everything set up, depending on platform-specific intricacies.

Setting up your text editor

To actually write code, you’re going to need a text editor. There’s nothing wrong with going with a basic text editor, like Notepad on Windows, but that’s not really going to serve you or your code editing needs very well.

There are hundreds of different text editors out there, but we’re going to only highlight a few that you might want to choose for yourself.

Visual Studio Code (VS Code)

Visual Studio Code is an almost open source text editor with IDE features, developed by Microsoft, using the Electron desktop app framework. It’s a fantastic “batteries-included” text editor for most people, and it’s incredibly simple to use.

However, there are a few things you might want to be aware of:

  • VS Code is not open source.

    Microsoft will tell you it’s “built on open source”.

    What that means is that Microsoft develops the open source text editor, which they call “Code - OSS”, under the open source MIT licence, and then add their proprietary Visual Studio branding to it afterwards.

    It’s the same as the difference between Chromium and Google Chrome - Chromium is the open source browser, Google Chrome is the same browser with Google’s proprietary branding and features.

    This is not necessarily a bad thing if you think not having an open source code editor is no big deal, but it is still something that Microsoft is very sneaky about.

    If this bugs you, then you can use VSCodium instead, which does the same thing Microsoft do - they take “Code - OSS” and add the VSCodium branding to it, and this version is indeed open source.

  • VS Code is a bit of a memory hog.

    VS Code is built using Electron. For the uninitiated, Electron is a way to build desktop apps using web browser technology. Effectively, this means that every Electron app is essentially a web browser - specifically, Chromium, which is what Google Chrome is based on.

    Electron apps, bundling an entire browser engine, introduce a lot of overhead. This makes VS Code take up more memory than it reasonably should sometimes. If you’re using a system that’s low on resources, VS Code is probably not for you.

  • VS Code is not exactly an IDE.

    VS Code, while it includes various features from contemporary IDEs, it itself is not an IDE - it’s intended as a lightweight code editor with extension support.

    An actual IDE is something like Eclipse, Visual Studio (not Code), IntelliJ IDEA, etc. These IDEs come with everything and the kitchen sink, whereas in VS Code you’re expected to download extensions before doing anything IDE-adjacent.

    In recent years, VS Code has been peddling its AI features alongside GitHub Copilot, their “AI-powered” code completion utility using OpenAI’s GPT generative AI models. If that went over your head, don’t worry. I don’t get it either.