Bundle binary in extension

[Tiwalun]

It's possible to bundle binaries in a vscode extension, and this can be done in a platform specific way. See https://code.visualstudio.com/api/working-with-extensions/publishing-extension#platformspecific-extensions

It would be nice to bundle the debugger binary, so that users don't have to install a separate tool.

[Tiwalun]

See also https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-platform-specific-sample for an example.

[noppej]

@Tiwalun Quite a few people I know of, use this extension with probe-rs from the master branch (usually a few fixes and features ahead of the published).

By bundling the binary, would we add complications for those use cases?

[Tiwalun]

Not really, we can just have a configurable setting where you can choose the bundled binary or a different one.

Or you use the existing mode where you connect over tcp.

[noppej]

Fair. We have existing config settings in launch.json to overwrite the binary. I think we can re-use that with some adjustment.

[noppej]

I had a look at the examples included above, and cannot see how to get from their 'dependency' on a node package that includes the platform executables, to our own cargo release of the binaries. For now, I will leave this enhancement for someone else to attempt, with this final note:

The extension currently supports the runtimeExecutable property in the launch.json config. It will be nice if we can leverage that to toggle between the "packaged" versus "locally installed" version of probe-rs, rather than introduce a new property.

[Tiwalun]

I had a look at the examples included above, and cannot see how to get from their 'dependency' on a node package that includes the platform executables, to our own cargo release of the binaries. For now, I will leave this enhancement for someone else to attempt, with this final note:

cargo dist supports npm packages, so it might be quite easy to get this:

https://opensource.axo.dev/cargo-dist/book/installers/npm.html

[Tiwalun]

But it seems we could also place a binary in the extension directory, and then bundle it. That might be easier than using a complete other package.

[noppej]

I'm guessing it is safe to assume we have a binary for each of the VSCode supported platforms?

[noppej]

@Tiwalun Can we close this as fixed by #93?