JetBrains, the creator of many popular IDEs, has an exciting announcement for Rust developers. RustRover is a new IDE specifically for the Rust language. Previously the only tooling available for Rust from JetBrains was IntelliJ Rust, which was a plugin for IntelliJ-based IDEs.
For many years, Rust has topped the Stack Overflow Developer Survey as the most loved language. According to JetBrains, the Rust community includes over 2.8 million developers. This popularity is what led JetBrains to focus on making a dedicated platform for those developers
Despite its benefits, some of the challenges with developing in Rust is that it is a complex language and has a steep learning curve. JetBrains says RustRover was designed to tackle those challenges.
“With RustRover, we are addressing the evolving needs of developers in a market that is rapidly developing, witnessing a surge in the Rust ecosystem: 56% of developers we surveyed have started adopting Rust in the last 6 months,” said Vitaly Bragilevsky, developer advocate of RustRover. “By combining advanced coding support and integrated toolchain capabilities, our IDE enables developers to navigate this growing landscape more efficiently and contribute to the thriving Rust community.”
It offers many features to help make the language simpler to use, such as code suggestions, templates, and smart refactorings.
In addition to helping developers write better code, faster, it also includes many features designed to help developers understand their code better. These features include syntax highlighting, full type information, access to documentation, macro expansion, code search and navigation, and cross-language actions.
The IDE also offers many capabilities for debugging, such as test runners, navigation to the part of code that is being tested, support for various run targets, and profiling.
On top of that, it also helps support the task of managing projects and their dependencies. It offers support for Cargo and Cargo.toml, support for build scripts, access to crates documentation, and code completion in dependency declarations.
RustRover is ready to go, with an out-of-the-box setup. Developers can get started coding right away without needing to first install plugins or configure the IDE. It also includes support for all tools part of the Rust toolchain, including the Rust Compiler.
It also supports developer collaboration, and developers can code together in real time and have conversations right within the IDE.
