The intellisense from clangd is much better and faster than the Microsoft C++ extension, if you can set up a compile_commands.json. Although debugging still relies on the Microsoft extension. Although I don't think it's going to be hard to create an extension just for debugging (if it does not already exist?)

Is there a ‘right’ (or simple/direct) way to generate this using various buildchains? I remember setting this up so I could use Sublime with intellisense a while ago, and finding that I could only get it to generate with a specific compiler chain on windows (ninja I think?)

Minor annoyance to have to make my c make project generate buildchain files for a compiler I’m not using & copy that file into my project root to commit it- unrelated to the original question, but also annoying that I have to manually generate it every time I make significant codebase changes.

Yes, even on medium sized code bases (few 100K lines), the Microsoft C++ extension gets extremely slow. Clangd is a much better option.

There are other third-party extensions which rely on the Microsoft C++ one. I have recently ran into this problem with my VSCodium setup.

I agree. It's way better. You can use the CodeLLDB extension for debugging.

https://github.com/vadimcn/codelldb

Not just faster, I have never been able to get jump to declaration/definition/references to work reliably without clangd.

I've had the opposite experience with weird C++ projects from some customers that use external toolchains. For some reason even creating the compile_commands.json file with Bear doesn't work, while the proprietary Intellisense extension works out of the box without any configuration.

Lldb and rr (midas) have vscode extensions