IntelliJ Rust (opens in new tab)

Both IntelliJ Rust and Rust Analyzer (an LSP server for Vim, VSCode, and other editors) teams publish their changelings weekly on Monday. Often the two blog posts get linked on /r/rust right next to each other. It's always heartwarming seeing users of both coming over to these threads and thanking the maintainers.

Set it to Clippy and real-time lint instead of cargo check

Using it everyday and I can’t confirm this at all.

Worst case you can enable clippy to run in the background.

> Last time I tried this

When was that?

Latest from July 10th, changelog:

https://intellij-rust.github.io/2023/07/10/changelog-198.htm...

There's a project setting for running linting tools on the fly rather than when invoking actions. These will do stuff like lint and refresh stuff as you type, but it adds latency and other weird jitters if the tools take longer than expected to finish execution. This is indicated next to the checkbox that enables the setting.

I usually turn the setting on, but there are a few projects that do make the UI sluggish where u have to turn them off. I'm not entirely sure what the problem is, some code with many dependencies works absolutely fine while some code with only basic crates turns into a lagfest. My suspicion is that there's a crate somewhere deep down the dependency tree that makes use of some very intensive macros that trip up the tooling.

I've also noticed that the most recent release of Rust made working with the tooling feel a lot snappier. Not sure what changed, but it's nice to see.

One laat thing I always recommend anyone running into weird IntelliJ/Clion/IDE slowdowns: check the difference between antivirus off/on to see if that influences things. Windows Defender just can't seem to deal with a program opening many small files. What this means for you depends (you probably shouldn't disable AV on a company laptop) but it may solve the mystery why your experience doesn't match other people's.

I have been using this for a while and don't have to do much. It automatically reloads for me. My only gripe is that it won't allow me to right-click and automatically create a use statement for Derive macros. But I may be spoiled by switching back and forth between Kotlin and Rust.

I personally haven't experienced that issue, but in my experience IntelliJ IDEs can offer a different experience per environment based on your Java and filesystem settings.

Especially if you happen to be doing anything like using WSL or a mounted network share. For example, I had to do a lot of workarounds to resolve indexing and line ending issues while working on a Windows machine and running my code on a remote container server running nix.

I've not had that experience personally, and I've used CLion with the rust plugin for quite a while.

The plug-in itself is fine now, but linting through cargo check is frustratingly sluggish especially in repos with nontrivial Diesel codegen. Like noted in a sibling comment, it’s turned off by default and you get a notification suggesting you turn it off (uess you turn off the notification).

It’s improved a lot the last year. Check it out again

> I had to re-execute Cargo commands to get it to pick up on new files etc.

This hasn't been fixed, but it's my biggest pain point.

> felt very sluggish to me

We're working in a Rust workspace monorepo with about 30 crates and it feels fast.

What kind of system? IntelliJ has always seemed to require a lot of resources.

I bought 16GB a decade ago, for example, so I wouldn’t have swapping issues with my tools. That machine is still usable today.

Every HN intellij thread:

"Its sooo slow"

I am not sure why people use these tools, I've tried and they seem at best on-par, at worse, sooo much worse. I get real Microsoft vibes, a sales team comes in, takes the purchasing team to a concert/sports and dinner to 'discuss business'. And its announced that everything needs to be done on M$ sharepoint/Intellij.

For anyone reading the comments with the assumption the OP link is just for the longstanding rust plugin, it is. Do not take the comment above to mean a standalone rust IDE, a la Goland, was announced. Hopes lifted, hopes dashed.

I dont really get why Jetbrains even makes specific IDEs. I just use Intellij for everything and it seems to have same functionality as all their language specific IDEs?

JetBrains RustBucket

I have a similar experience when using rust-analyzer and copilot in vscode.

HN markdown doesn't use _, it uses * - wrap your text in asterisks to make it italic

There's debugger integration included in CLion but not in idea community edition.

Overall, I’ve found JetBrains IDEs to be “nicer” than VS Code.

There’s a level of polish and thoughtfulness in the design that I’ve not found in VS Code.

It’s hard to put into words, because it consists of lots of little things.

Definitely not perfect though. Just better IMO.

The plug-ins for JetBrains are often of a substantially better quality. Their database management extension is quite awesome. You get a lot out of the box too. Their support is usually very professional, if you ever need them. It runs on a JVM so you can tune it to your particular project requirements if you need but the defaults are fine. You shouldn’t turn on too many code inspections as they can slow down the UI responsiveness but you can tune the JVM and use a latency minimizing GC such as ZGC, though this is not something a regular user would ever need to look into I think. This will sound like an advert if I go on. And since I do a lot of other stuff in their IDEs, I have a uniform UI and UX.

Same reason you'd use any other IntelliJ IDE: Most things just work out of the box without having to install and configure dozens of plugins.

Admittedly, for Rust the gap isn't as big as with other languages, as RA is an excellent language server, but with CLion + Rust you get pretty great debugging support.

I've found that IntelliJ is much better at having code completion always work, even in the presence of macros. Rust Analyzer has a tendency to randomly break down when you're writing code, even with something as simple as the vec![] macro.

I reported one such case here: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-analyzer/issues/12524, but this still happens to me pretty frequently.

I don't think you would. VSCode is free, this one is not.