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Comment by gravypod | Hacker News Reader

> 1 in 19: lack of IDEs (1 in 4 non-users)

I expected that to be higher actually, but that's still the only reason I don't use the language. I've come to rely heavily on IDEs. Whether right or not it's a huge factor in my decision to wait for the language.

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I've been writing Java in Vim from time to time for 3 years. Rust is much more pleasant to deal with in a plain text editor. I encourage you to give it a try.

If that's the case I highly recommend giving VSCode a spin. With racer I've got solid code complete, goto def and docs.

They've also been making leaps and bounds in terms of features so I can only imagine it improving even more.

What kind of IDE support do you typically use that isn't handled by a modern text editor (such as go to definition, variable renaming, find and replace, etc)? I'm starting to use CLion for my C++ work now, because "go to definition" is much more reliable than most editors can manage with C++ code, but I find that most of the fancy refactoring features like extracting functions or subclasses are not used often enough to be really useful.

The features I need are:

   - Refactoring Support (rename variable, class, function)
   - Code Folding
   - Automatic type checking
   - Automatic error detection (tells me when syntactical or other errors are made)
   - Built-in documentation loading/display on hover of cursor. 
   - Same thing as above except with any documentation I add myself on a function. 
   - Debugger with comment overlay of values (like PyCharm)
   - Dependency management/Building/Deploying all a *button* (not 10 commands) away 
   - VCS integration
   - Automatic code formatting 
   - Automatic code "cleaner" (change for (int i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) to an expanded loop for example)
   - Automatic import cleaning
   - Automatic project creation for basic use cases (console, GUI, maybe a web framework)
   - Change CWD/environment variable for running the program
   - GOTO definition 
   - A Graphical User Interface (Graphical being the biggest requirement)

Outside of all of those, there is a much much much more important feature: Auto Complete. A smart auto complete. An autocomplete that understands the type system and the function's return types.

For instance if I am typing:

   String sub = someString.

It shouldn't recommend "length()" as well as in the case of:

   String lengthStr = Integer.toString(someString.

It should recommend things that return an integer. This needs to be fast and needs to be non-case-sensitive. Also, if I am typing

Lis

It should recommend List, ArrayList, etc in that order with the closest thing up front. It should also in the recommendation screen show documentation, a link to official documentation, and possibly an example of how to initialize/use the code. If something isn't imported and so it's not currently usable, if the user clicks enter or whatever on the auto-complete screen you should import it. If it has that, and has that working quickly, and has that working completely it's a "real" IDE in my book. That list is just "wants", this one thing is a "need"

If I had that for rust, I'd switch over to rust as my main language. Anything that doesn't have something like that will never compete with Eclipse in ease-of-adoption in my book.

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