and it's gotten me thinking, how come there are no open-source/libre IDEs for Rust like C++ has?
There's tons of mature text editors, of course, and some, like NeoVim, can act as an IDE should you throw enough plugins at it, but "True IDE" support is pretty slim - unless you want to pay for IntelliJ, or sell your soul to Microsoft, RIDE died, Corrosion is unmaintained & I crie everytim
It doesn't officially support Rust, programmer Emma Gospodinova made a plugin on behalf of KDE, but that went nowhere unfortunately...
However, I remembered something: a LOT of people use Kate, which is another KDE thing, but is a text editor, to write Rust code, using the rust-lang server, KDevelop, afaik, is identical in the way it handles language servers and the like; to Kate
So, has anyone used KDevelop? How did it go? How did you go about getting Rust to work on it? C++ devs speak highly of KDevelop, but no Rustacean has shared their experience... Do any of you recommend it?
I use Zed for coding Rust, and IDE features (like refactoring, content-assist) are through LSP.
I haven't tried using it for debugging (I haven't needed to), so not sure what the experience is there.
Yes, I have!
Both are text editors and not IDEs in the traditional sense though, as you've said, you haven't tried debugging, and that is kind've expected from an IDE...
Me personally - I have been loving Lapce, Zed I couldn't get along with because of the UI, but Lapce looks & runs great
Sidenote: I was not aware areweideyet was as abandoned as RIDE was
You don't need to pay; you can use RustRover instead of the paid plugin for IntelliJ Ultimate. It's what I'm using because I don't see much advantage in using an open-source software equivalent—most of it being editors, as you said. JetBrains' products aren't perfect, but they're very good and using alternatives always left me sceptical, but it could just be because I'm used to their platform.
The other thing is that many people are used to their editors because they're using it for other tasks, so I understand why they sometimes prefer that to an IDE, even if the features are not so smoothly integrated.
I did try KDevelop a little a few years back, and it was very promising. Probably the best of the open-source IDEs I'd tried, so I'm sure it's a good candidate. At least, I bet they're not wasting time adding AI assistants or a new UI that looks like VSCode to attract more users.
RustRover is amazing, but the free version forbids building commercial software & has telemetry which you cannot opt-out of, very nosey telemetry... So I've been looking for alternatives
The telemetry is something to be wary of, but I've looked into those files in the context of the performance issues they recently had, and it's not an issue. It does generate many log files, though. Now I have a licence and I left it on for a while because I know it's helping them to evaluate the performances.
Their new commercial licence is something else, of course. What a change. But if you're using an IDE in a commercial context, the small price shouldn't be relevant in comparison to other factors.
I'm not saying it's the best tool; it really depends how a team is organized, their flow, their ideology, and so on.
I really want to like lapce but it feels like they've got bogged down trying to create their own UI library and that's tanking lapce development. The last time I used it (probably 6 months ago) It didn't feel ready for real usage - it's a great toy/demo but when you try to do real development you bump into too many little irritants to justify using it.
I have found vanilla Code - OSS to also be a great alternative to the proprietary build that is VS Code, I hope Visual Studio itself might go FOSS someday, though Visual Studio is a shoddy IDE for Rust to my knowledge
I’ve been using Neovim (LazyVim) for about 4 months now, and it’s honestly been a great experience for Rust development. With rust-analyzer, rust-tools.nvim, and DAP for debugging, it feels really close to a full IDE — just much lighter and more flexible.
I checked out KDevelop since I’ve heard good things from C++ devs, but the Rust support seems pretty rough and unmaintained. Meanwhile, Neovim’s plugin ecosystem moves fast and integrates smoothly with Cargo, Clippy, formatting, and test runners, so it’s been much easier to keep everything working nicely.
Unfortunately on Windows LazyVim's example setup at least takes longer to start for even random text files than IntelliJ, and I found the docs sufficiently opaque that I didn't want to spend weeks learning how to get it "right".
That and the fact that even after a week of using it "as an IDE" (I've been using vim as an editor and the bindings wherever available) I was still having issues with basic things like getting it to complete import paths in typescript or going to a definition, let alone figuring out whatever the debug UX is, I gave it up as a bad job and went back to Jetbrains.
Maybe if someone has a really good set of documentation I could take another look, but if it's not actually significantly better performance than Jetbrains it feels like I'm just wasting my time to try to be cool. Then again, that's pretty much the only reason I use Dvorak
I now use zed everyday. Helix in terminal (sometimes inside zed) .. lapce is also cool.
Use helix if you want to skip configuring neovim for a year. Hx and off you go.
Y'know the more and more I dig into this I feel like real Rust support on a proper free as in freedom IDE like KDevelop would make Rust so much more accessible
I'm all for more tools to entice people into Rust world.
I'm not sure how much "more accessible" Rust can be though. I do all my Rust editing in Zed (previously VS Code). Rust analyser points out all my syntactic mistakes as I type. Building and running it is only a "cargo run" in my terminal. Or usually just an up-arrow and return to rerun the perviously build. Or the thing is auto-reloaded when developing WASM for the browser.
So what are we missing? A "run" button to click with the mouse? Hardly an improvement in ergonomics.
