That has changed somewhat. Among other innovations, Visual Studio Code now has good support for editing, running, and debugging Java code through a set of Java-specific extensions.

Planned Java-related improvements for VS Code range from smarter code completion and better debugging to deeper integration with Kubernetes and cloud services.

Cloud-native development figures prominently in a new roadmap published by Microsoft's Java on Visual Studio Code dev team.

The October update of Microsoft's Visual Studio Code for Java comes with updates in the code editing and debugging experience, thanks to the Java 19 preview of Virtual Threads in Project Loom.