Microsoft MakeCode is based on the open source project Microsoft Programming Experience Toolkit (PXT). Microsoft MakeCode is the name in the user-facing editors, PXT is used in all the GitHub sources.
PXT is a framework for creating special-purpose programming experiences for beginners, especially focused on computer science education. PXT's underlying programming language is a subset of TypeScript (leaving out JavaScript dynamic features).
The main features of PXT are:
- a Blockly-based code editor along with converter to the text format
- a Monaco code editor that powers VS Code, editor's features are listed here.
- extensibility support to define new blocks in TypeScript
- an ARM Thumb machine code emitter
- a command-line package manager
https://github.com/Microsoft/pxt
https://github.com/microsoft/pxt-maker
https://github.com/microsoft/uf2