Maybe it's just that I don't understand what clangd provides that's so great, but rust-analyzer, despite a few hiccups I've had with it, seems completely amazing at what it does.
What clangd does is work.
So -- this guy used an extension (named Rust) with rust-analyzer, a configuration known to not work, it didn't work(!), and the extension author recommends he tries the extension made for rust-analyzer.
Hardly a case for the ages. Guy uses unsupported config and things don't work?
> What clangd does is work.
Don't doubt it. I'm just saying -- I haven't had any problems with the rust-analyzer extension since it became the Rust default. But, yes, I had a few hiccups and crashes beforehand, no doubt. I just have to imagine it's both younger, and doing more/different things than clangd.
If I search for "Rust" in the VS Code Extension Marketplace, it shows the extension you linked to... but it is clearly marked as deprecated, and VS Code won't even let me install it. So, it’s even more of a non-issue today than it was a year ago.
The actual rust-analyzer extension works fine for me. I think Go's tooling is slightly better in my experience, but both are far better than any experience I've had with C++ tooling.
What I take exception with is "it’s always LLVM’s fault, I know". If you're going to trash other people's hard work in such a glib manner, it behooves you to know the details of what you're talking about. Tell us, why would a language server that doesn't generate any code use LLVM?
One of several issues around engaging with the Rust community at least as personified on HN is that it's very difficult to see any other outcome than being backed into a pretty extreme corner: I started my involvement with this thread saying that I like Rust and want to like it more, but found taking a piece of software that seems interesting on its own merits and headlining the Rust part (whether due to the original post authors or the submitters, makes no difference) contributes to a skepticism-inducing sense that there's an agenda other than "cool software" sitting close to "Rust" in the embedding space.
And, if you care to, you can watch me go from "Rust is cool, great stuff written in it" -> "hey some of these claims are seeming extravagant" -> "ok let's not get carried away, the cited examples are mostly Haskell semantics and clang optimization" -> "alright I'm calling bullshit that all the tooling is superior, that's fucking stupid" give or take. It's a pragmatic cool programming language that people write great software in. That's plenty, that's more than most languages ever achieve, and Rust is far from done achieving things.
`rust-analyzer --version` reports: "rust-analyzer 2022-04-11" on my primary Nix shell. `clangd --version` reports "clangd version 13.0.1" on the same env. I drive both of these things on the command line, in CI, and via `emacs` (on `eglot`) every month at a minimum, every week almost certainly, and usually every day.
I have seven nontrivial elisp `defun` and/or `defadvice` (deep into `rustic-mode`) stanzas for keeping `rust-analyzer` working ok. I have to defeat it's naive `Cargo.toml` search in interesting projects, I have to turn off big blocks of my buffer going RED ALERT RED while a brace remains missing which is statistically most of the time, and most importantly, I have to manually restart it with save excursion trickery so that I can survive a crash without blowing my session. Some of these defects may be as old as earlier this year when I last audited all that.
For `clangd` I have zero such nonsense. Which is completely understandable, it's an older and therefore more mature piece of software. That's not a knock on Rust or `rust-analyzer`.
But I made the fatal mistake of posting the wrong link to the issue tracker, for which my reward was to cause the "Flying Fucking HN Rust Brigade Gangbang Comment/Downvote Battalion" to put the Batman light on.
If you folks are comfortable being the "extremists people are too tired to fuck with", then do you. But I know for absolute certain that I am not the only person doing some level of Rust adoption in spite of this bullshit rather than because of it.
Sorry, but this is patently false and is just straight-up misinformation. rust-analyzer is an extraordinary piece of work with careful, well-thought out idiomatic software design, easy usage and relatively low productive defect count.
Rust, the language, itself might be rather over-hyped here on HN - its most loved status will drop significantly with larger real-world adoption. However, the rust-analyzer project isn't overhyped and is a clean and elegant product of software engineering. I wish I was good enough to design and code language software like this.
