The Eclipse Foundation has pinned a 1.0 designation on its Theia IDE platform, which aims to allow devs to build their applications without having to worry if they are working in the cloud, on prem or both.

In a statement announcing Theia 1.0 the organisation declared it “a true open source alternative to Microsoft’s popular Visual Studio Code (VS Code) software”

Meanwhile, Sven Efftinge, co-founder of both Gitpod and TypeFox, and one of the project’s originators, declared it “not your parents’ browser IDE” and said it was “the first browser-based IDE platform that supports all the latest programming language smartness in a depth similar to your local IDE”.

We’ll leave it to you to decide who’s likely to be more put out by the announcement – Microsoft or the millions of gen X’ers and boomers, already locked down at home, and now apparently locked out of the IDE VIP room.

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said in a statement: “Visual Studio Code is one of the world’s most popular development environments. Not only does Theia allow developers to install and reuse VS Code extensions, it provides an extensible and adaptable platform that can be tailored to specific use cases.”

The statement also claims that as well as being cloud/desktop agnostic, Theia is more modular than VS Code, allowing for more customization, as well as being vendor neutral.

As Efftinge further explains in his blog, Theia’s native support for the VS Code extension protocol, “means you can install any of the 16,000+ existing extensions developed by the open-source community in Theia.”

Unfortunately, he continued, “Microsoft prohibits non-Visual Studio products from installing any binaries downloaded from their marketplace.”

So, “We encourage VS Code extension developers to push their extensions to Open VSX in addition to Microsoft’s marketplace.” Open VSX is “an open-source implementation of a VS Code extension registry that we have developed under the umbrella of the Eclipse Foundation”.

Core changes included adding  “functionality to ensure that nodes are refreshed properly on tree expansion”, as well as the ability to customer the layout and stored state of view-containers.

There are a number of breaking changes, including a number of typos fixed in function names. The full changelog is here.