JetBrains has announced its new standalone Rust IDE, RustRover, which is now accessible under an early access program and will bring Rust support on a par with other languages supported by JetBrains IDEs, says the company.
While JetBrains was the main force behind the open source Rust plugin for IntelliJ IDEA and CLion, the Czech software company decided to stop developing it and move to a commercial, closed-source solution specifically dedicated to Rust in order to provide a better experience for Rust developers, says JetBrains.
RustRover supports syntax highlighting and code completion, code generation, on-the-fly quick fixes, smart refactoring, and live templates. It also provides an integrated debugger, test runners, run configurations, profiling and performance analysis, and includes features specifically dedicated to Web app development, such as integrated HTTP client, database access, and Docker support.
Furthermore, RustRover will play nicely with other languages and tools used in the Rust ecosystem, including Cargo and TOML, and integrate with Git, GitHub, and other VCS.
Based on this list of features, JetBrains says RustRover will bring Rust support on a par with JetBrains IDEs for other languages.
JetBrains announcement was met with mostly positive remarks on both Hacker News and Reddit, with several commenters highlighting the value of having an IDE dedicated to Rust that is officially supported and backed by paying customers). Others brought the attention to the superiority of a standalone IDE vs. a general IDE supporting a variety of languages, such as using IntelliJ with language-specific plugins.
Other commenters criticized the fact that JetBrains is deprecating the current Rust plugin for IntelliJ and CLion.
For the existing open-source plugin, we’ll do our best to maintain compatibility with newer versions of our IDEs, but we won’t be fixing bugs or adding new features.
The plugin will anyway remain open source and is licensed under the MIT license, which will make it possible for the community to bring its development further.
JetBrains says they will officially release RustRover when it is ready, hopefully no later than September 2024.