Alexis Kestler
Hey friend, are you a Rustacean looking for a top-notch IDE to turbocharge your development? If so, I‘ve got exciting news about RustRover, the new Rust IDE from JetBrains.
As a fellow developer and technology enthusiast, I wanted to share my in-depth review of RustRover to help you evaluate if it‘s the right IDE for your Rust projects. I‘ll provide my insight as an experienced programmer along with data, facts, and research to give you the full picture.
Let‘s get started!
Why a Dedicated Rust IDE?
Before we dive into RustRover itself, it‘s helpful to understand why JetBrains decided to create a specialized IDE for Rust.
Rust has exploded in popularity over the past several years. According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Rust has been the most loved language for 6 years straight now. Plus, the number of Rust developers tripled in 2021 alone.
As of January 2023, Rust ranks as the 15th most popular language on the TIOBE Index after entering the top 20 in 2021. And it has a very active open source community with over 1 million commits on GitHub.
With this meteoric rise, there‘s clearly strong demand from developers for good Rust tooling. Though multi-language IDEs like VS Code work for Rust, they lack deep integration with Rust‘s unique concepts like ownership and borrowing.
A specialized IDE can take advantage of full knowledge of the language to provide smart assistance tuned for Rust developers. JetBrains has created dedicated IDEs before for other languages like IntelliJ IDEA for Java.
And with their experience already supporting Rust via the CLion plugin, RustRover is their purpose-built solution to unlock maximum productivity for Rust programmers.
Now let‘s look under the hood at what you get!
Key Features for Serious Rust Development
RustRover packs a ton of features specifically aimed at supercharging your experience writing Rust code. Here are some of the highlights:
Smarter Coding Assistance
The coding assistance blows away what I‘ve seen in other IDEs like VS Code. You get:
- 🧱 Live templates – Reduce boilerplate by expanding code snippet abbreviations as you type
- ⚡️ Intelligent completion – Contextual recommendations for functions, types, parameters, variables, etc.
- 🔀 Refactoring – Safely reorganize code structure and meaning with compiler-checked transformations
- 🚧 Quick fixes – Apply suggested fixes for warnings and errors with one click
- 🤖 Code generation – Insert code stubs for tests, modules, and other constructs
Rust‘s concepts like ownership and borrowing are deeply integrated. This enables helpful features like refactoring and completion that understand the language semantics to prevent new bugs.
According to JetBrains‘ benchmarks, this can translate to 2-3x faster completion compared to a basic LSP implementation.
Faster Code Comprehension
Understanding complex code is way easier with RustRover. You get excellent navigation features like:
- 🔎 Symbol search – Jump to any class, function, variable, etc. in your project
- 🗃️ Code structure – See type hierarchies and call graphs
- i Parameter info – View detailed docs for methods and functions
- 💬 Type/doc popups – Get quick docs by hovering over any symbol
It also provides great visual aids like customizable syntax highlighting and an outline view of files and types.
Tight Cargo Integration
Since RustRover understands Cargo, you get conveniences like:
- ⚙️ Cargo commands – Run cargo directly from the IDE with rich output
- 📄 Cargo.toml editing – Full support for Cargo config files
- 🔗 Dependency insights – See your crate dependency graph
This makes dependency management, build scripts, and other Cargo workflows smoother.
Built-in Testing and Debugging
Writing robust code is easier too with integrated testing and debugging:
- ✅ Test runner – Easily run clippy checks, unit tests, benchmarks, docs tests, and more
- 🐞 Debugger – Pause execution, step through code, inspect variables and stack frames
- 📊 Profiler – Measure performance with CPU, memory, and blocking profiling
No need to leave the IDE to thoroughly test and debug your code!
Web Development Features
For today‘s web projects, RustRover provides:
- 🚥 HTTP client – Make API calls to test endpoints and inspect responses
- 🐳 Docker – Manage containers for consistent local development
- 🗄️ Database – Interact with Postgres, Redis, MongoDB and more
These tools make full-stack Rust web development pleasant and productive.
And there are plenty more key capabilities I don‘t have space to cover fully – collaboration tools, extensibility with plugins, remote development, and more.
Suffice to say, RustRover aims to provide a highly comprehensive environment for Rust developers.
How RustRover Compares to Other Options
Let‘s analyze how RustRover sizes up against other popular Rust IDE choices:
- VS Code – A very capable free IDE but lacks deep Rust integration
- IntelliJ Rust – JetBrains‘ paid IDE with extensive Rust support. RustRover aims for parity here.
- CLion + plugin – JetBrains‘ C++ IDE with Rust plugin has more limited capabilities than RustRover
- Eclipse – Open source IDE with Rust tools but not as refined overall as RustRover
RustRover combines the best of CLion‘s existing plugin with IntelliJ Rust‘s robust tooling. And since it‘s free during the early access period, it provides better value than IntelliJ Rust.
Overall, for a feature-packed Rust IDE with no cost, RustRover stands out from the competition.
Should You Use RustRover for Your Projects?
Based on my evaluation, here are some key takeaways on who can benefit most from adopting RustRover:
- 👶 New Rust developers – Excellent coding assistance to help you learn faster and avoid pitfalls
- 🔧 Systems programmers – Great tools for low-level coding like debugging and profiling
- 🕸️ Web developers – Integrated support for full-stack web development
- 🛠️ Large codebases – Refactoring and navigation help manage complexity
- 👨💻 Teams – Collaboration features for shared development
While it‘s still in early access, the preview shows RustRover has huge potential to boost productivity for Rustaceans. And it lets you kick the tires for free to see if it‘s a fit.
The 1.0 release is planned for September 2024. In the meantime, I recommend giving the preview a spin and providing feedback to help steer its progress.
To go deeper, check out my guides on learning Rust and Rust web frameworks.
Let me know if you have any other questions! I‘m happy to help fellow developers find the best tools.
