Rust should provide a basic, but solid IDE experience

[aturon]

Overview

For many people—even whole organizations—IDEs are an essential part of the
programming workflow. In the survey, 1 in 4 respondents mentioned requiring IDE
support before using Rust seriously. Tools like Racer and the IntelliJ Rust
plugin have made great progress this year, but compiler integration in its
infancy, which limits the kinds of tools that general IDE plugins can provide.

The problem statement here says "solid, but basic" rather than "world-class" IDE support to set realistic expectations for what we can get done this year. Of course, the precise contours will need to be driven by implementation work, but we can enumerate some basic constraints for such an IDE here:

• It should be reliable: it shouldn't crash, destroy work, or give inaccurate
  results in situations that demand precision (like refactorings).
• It should be responsive: the interface should never hang waiting on the
  compiler or other computation. In places where waiting is required, the
  interface should update as smoothly as possible, while providing
  responsiveness throughout.
• It should provide basic functionality. At a minimum, that's: syntax
  highlighting, basic code navigation (e.g. go-to-definition), code completion,
  build support (with Cargo integration), error integration, and code
  formatting.

Note that while some of this functionality is available in existing IDE/plugin
efforts, a key part of this initiative is to (1) lay the foundation for plugins
based on compiler integration (2) pull together existing tools into a single
service that can integrate with multiple IDEs.

Projects

• Rust Language Service, which provides a server that runs in the background, providing IDEs, editors, and other tools with information about Rust programs.

[Nashenas88]

To add to this, I've been working on the borrow visualizer and updating here periodically. I hope to incorporate at least basic functionality into Rust Language Service this year. The final version would be dependent on the MIR implementation of the borrow checker.

[loganintech]

Would you have any plan to write an official Visual Studio Code extension? There is one already but it doesn't support debugging. It does use racer to help with some stuff like goto line but the editor itself already has that.

I should add, some companies have written extensions before. RedHat wrote an extension that supports reference and tons of other stuff.

[abique]

What about QtCreator support?

[Nashenas88]

@JewsOfHazard, it's already in the works with the Rust Language Service. See https://github.com/jonathandturner/rls_vscode

[KalitaAlexey]

You can try my extension: https://github.com/KalitaAlexey/vscode-rust/
It works with RLS or with racer.

[patlecat]

JetBrains.com is certainly a partner that you should intensify the cooperation with because they put some effort into creating a plugin already.

MSVC could also be interested but they will probably demand a .NET version of Rust -> # Rust
Embarcadero.com could also be interested if there is enough demand.

Those 3 are the main IDE manufacturers nowadays.

[sophiajt]

@patlecat - definitely. In fact, we've already been chatting with jetbrains (iirc, we met with someone from jetbrains at the last RustConf).

MSVC (do you mean Visual Studio?) doesn't need a .NET version of Rust. They have a large plugin ecosystem that we could provide a plugin for. If you mean having first-party support straight from Microsoft, I'm not sure where they would fit us into their stack (cloud? games?), but it is a possible in the future as Rust continues to grow.

I think the hope is that having high-quality plugins for all major editors and IDEs give developers the best set of choices. If vendors of IDEs want to add even better support, the RLS is built to let them leverage, and we'd be happy to work with them if they needed additional functionality.

[azazar]

Shouldn't basic functionality include code documentation lookup?

[GuillaumeGomez]

@azazar: I can only approve with this question.

[sophiajt]

@azazar - documentation lookup is something we're working on for RLS (it may already be working in parts, actually).

[Immortalin]

@aturon this issue should be renamed to Basic but solid editing experience

[aturon]

@Immortalin can you say more? The results from last year's survey that partly led to this roadmap goal were specifically about typical IDE experiences.

[Immortalin]

@aturon the phrasing feels more natural...