I think I’m going to start learning Rust. Can anyone suggest a good IDE to use?
rust-analyzeris a pretty good LSP, and works in most modern text editors.My advice? Just pick an editor and stick to it.
VSCode? Sure.
Jetbrains? Good choice.
Hell, Emacs? Why not?
I personally use Neovim, and it just works. No matter what I’m programming in, I’m still at home.
Just pick an editor that works for you. I’d suggest VSCode. Use VSCodium for a true FOSS experience, or Helix for a beginner friendly terminal editor.
If you really just want something Rust-focused, there’s RustRover from Jetbrains, but that’s about it.
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…which is proprietary.
As are all their products.
And it will be freaking awesome.
I mean, I mostly wanted to point that out because OP prefers FOSS, but I did think at least their IntelliJ Community Edition was open-source.
But I just checked their website and it says “Free, built on open source”, arguably the worst option, although I guess, it’s what the MIT folks want.I just hate how people overwhelmingly recommend proprietary editors. It’s the one thing you’d think the FOSS community should be exceedingly good at.
If you’re actually developing FOSS with it, you can use their products for free.
JetBrains has a lot of good will in the community, and for good reason.
Would it be nicer if their IDEs were FOSS? Probably. Would it hurt their profits? Most likely.
There’s not going to be a rust-specific FOSS editor AFAIK (nothing like RustRover from JetBrains). However the Rust extensions are first-class experience on VS Codium, Neovim, Emacs, etc.
More importantly, unlike Java, C#, Kotlin, C++, or Python Rust doesn’t benefit all that much from a language-specific IDE. There’s no bulky management of a virtual environment, no make files, no maven, etc. Just a human-readable cargo.toml for your packages, an install command, and a build+run command.
There’s no bulky management of a virtual environment, no make files, no maven, etc. Just a human-readable cargo.toml for your packages
In your perspective, what’s the difference between a cargo.toml and a requirements.txt, packages.json, pom.xml, etc? Is there any?
Vanilla
cargo.tomlfiles are more akin to arequirements.txtthan any of the others, which allow you to do things like set variables or create run scripts. However, vanillacargo.tomlfiles have some minimal Make functionality so it’s a bit more than just project dependencies. Each of those ecosystems has a slightly different approach to handling build tooling and dependency management. Rust puts the basic build and dependencies in one file with the assumption your system has the right Rust version, which is a lot simpler than others.So there is fundamentally no difference between cargo and any other contemporary dependency/package manager.
Also, it’s worth noting that cargo is a fairly good package manager all things considered. It has a native lock file format, unlike requirements.txt. Running code that’s built with cargo typically just works with
cargo build. No futzing around with special build commands for your specific build tooling like in js. I can’t speak for maven since I’ve only used it a little bit and never used it enough to be comfortable with it… but cargo just doesn’t really have many major paper cuts.Admittedly, cargo isn’t really special - it’s just a classic package manager that learned from the hindsight of its predecessors. It’s all minor improvements if any. There’s actually innovative build tooling out there: things like buck2, nix, etc. But those are an entirely different ball game.
Also, it’s worth noting that cargo is a fairly good package manager all things considered.
Yes, I’m familiar with Cargo. My point was to point out the absurdity and silliness of OP’s remarks on “no bulky management of a virtual environment, no make files, no maven, etc.” Once Rust fundamentalista take off their rose-tinted glasses, it’s clear that Cargo is just as good (or as bad) as any contemporary integrated build system.
While part of me agrees, I will say most ecosystems have some glaring flaws in them. Python’s lack of lock files in particular is something that annoys me to no end. Having to use poetry, pipenv, or whatever else people are using now to get around it sucks. Python’s lack of being able to use multiple versions of the same library is also a thing… but not something I’ve found issues with personally.
I’m not going to say cargo is some mind blowing system cause I really don’t think it’s innovative, at all - but I do think it’s far better than most ecosystems just due to benefits of hindsight. Having an opinionated, simple build system that does all the right things out of the box is valuable, and I can’t think of any mainstream language that really hits that mark otherwise.
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Vscode works well on Mac, and it has good Rust support.
Just wanted to point that rust-analyzer is the fantastic language server that powers the language support, and it runs in a lot of editors (VS Code, Emacs, Neovim, …)