Now that it’s capable of running natively on M1-based Macs, users may notice some performance and compatibility improvements. Up until now, M1-based Macs could only run VSCode via the Rosetta 2 translation framework built into Big Sur for Apple Silicon, which didn’t work perfectly as users found themselves constantly running into performance and compatibility issues with the app. Microsoft, for some reason, also chose to publish two different versions of the app-one for Apple Silicon and the other for Intel Macs-as opposed to developing a cross-compatible version. The Insiders build of VSCode, however, is usually considered to be close to the final version. The new update is a part of the Insiders build and not the final version.
The latest Insiders build of Visual Studio Code has finally added support for M1-based Macs, enabling native arm64 support, Microsoft has announced.