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Comment by mikerichards | Hacker News Reader

Can someone recommend a good IDE or editor with good IDE-like features for Rust? I think it's time for me to take the plunge and start learning a little bit about Rust.

Also, I'm assuming the windows support is good these days?

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Windows is a first-tier platform, and can be counted on to work since Windows is the largest platform for Firefox, and hence enormously important for Mozilla.

For working with Windows APIs, see https://github.com/retep998/winapi-rs

Every OS is a first tier platform for mozilla.

Mozilla is a business. They likely prioritize where they invest effort based on where their ad revenue comes from. Doing otherwise can hurt the business. kibwen implies that most revenue is from Windows users. So, Mozilla wants the Windows experience rock solid. That they have two, serious competitors on that platform reinforces that need.

Fortunately for us, they also put plenty of effort into making it work on less-popular platforms like my Linux desktop. I'm grateful even if it's lower priority. :)

Note: I'd be curious what OS's most Firefox and Rust developers use.

My impression is that the Mozilla developers are motivated by helping people and keeping the web open.

To answer your question about OSes, most Mozilla developers who I've met run Linux or Mac OS on their machines, but they also try to use Windows sometimes because Windows is such an important desktop platform.

I work for Mozilla and estimate the usage of Mac/Linux/Windows by Mozilla developers is probably 50/40/10% respectively, whereas the general population of Firefox users is more like 8/2/90%. Windows XP is still about 15%, more than Mac or Windows 10!

I can tell you that Servo, for the longest time, had no build instructions for Windows, so at least among the developers working on Servo, Unix seems to be the clear winner...

That question may be answered soon (although the survey is also targeted at people not using Rust):

http://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/05/09/survey.html

I think it's about to close in the next couple of days. wink wink nudge nudge

Well I've used Firefox on both Linux and Windows for years and the Linux version is better than the Windows version. More polished, faster, feels better integrated. The windows version is great too, but I believe a lot of the developers respect open source philosophy and therefore we get first class software for opensource operating systems. Chrome on the other hand sucked on Linux for a long time (but was really good when it first came out). Chrome is pretty good nowadays but still takes three minutes to start, whereas firefox just opens up.

I don't use a lot of other mozilla software except rust (a little) and from what I remember they had spotty support for Windows when Rust first came out, but this is true of pretty much all new languages unless Microsoft creates it.

> Well I've used Firefox on both Linux and Windows for years and the Linux version is better than the Windows version. More polished, faster, feels better integrated

Do you have any numbers on the "faster" aspect? Most comparisons I've seen put the Linux version solidly behind Windows version.

As for features, for example video playback on Linux Firefox has severely lagged behind Windows version. It's not very long time ago that I needed to make some "non-recommended" about:config changes to get youtube working.

Even integration-wise I think I have had more problems on Linux than on Windows, file associations, copy-paste, and misapplied themes being most notable issues that come to mind.

I'm pretty sure that I've seen even Mozilla say that majority of developer effort goes to Windows first, and it shows. While you anecdotally might have had good luck, I'd claim that is atypical

That's all true. I was referring to regular web surfing and such. Video and integration are substantially better on Windows.

I also thought Firefox ran better on Linux a bit. I decided to test your Chrome claim on my Core Duo 2 box running Ubuntu. I just downloaded Chrome from Software Center. First run took 2-3 seconds to usable browser. Something is wrong with your PC, distro, or installation.

"but I believe a lot of the developers respect open source philosophy and therefore we get first class software for opensource operating systems"

That's probably true to some degree. That the least, there might be more developers on FOSS boxes testing it which spots more problems. Hypothetical as I have no data on Rust to test it with.

Regarding your IDE question: https://areweideyet.com/

And also https://www.rust-lang.org/ides.html

I'm using Atom (on a fairly speedy machine, VS Code has some solid plugin support too) with:

    * atom-beautify (with rustfmt installed, `cargo install rustfmt`)
    * language-rust
    * linter + linter-rust (using cargo check, `cargo install cargo-check`)
    * you-complete-me (but YCM is not fun to install, so I'd recommend the racer plugin, both require the Rust source cloned and installed somewhere)

Altogether, those plugins give a pretty good Rust experience.

Is this like anywhere even close to the functionality of something like IntelliJ? Doesn't really sound like it. Linting and formatting, and completion does not an IDE make. How much code intelligence and introspection is there?

Not nearly as much as intellij. However the "linting" in this case is really just highlighting for compiler warnings and errors which are quite good in Rust. That said, you can use clippy (https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-clippy) to get some pretty solid static code analysis as a compiler plug in.

Also, I am very closely following the progress of the rust intellij project, it's coming along nicely.

+1 for racer, I use it with atom and it makes writing rust so much nicer. can't comment on the comparison with YCM, though

YCM uses racerd (https://github.com/jwilm/racerd) which keeps everything in a daemon process's memory instead of reparsing every time. It's a good bit faster (at least on my machine), but it uses racer under the hood for recommendations.

sounds interesting, I'll have to give it a shot!

I've had a great time with Tokamak: https://vertexclique.github.io/tokamak/

Emacs and Atom seem to have the most complete offerings via plugins like Racer. I'm quite happy with my Atom setup, but it is pretty far from turn key.

1.) You need to `cargo install racer` and add the bin to your path

2.) Clone the Rust source of your version of Rust, and add that to your path

3.) Install the plugin and set the paths in Atom

most of the popular editors have racer(autocomplete) integration.

Personally I've found visual studio code to have a good mix of light weight and functional.

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