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Rust-Analyzer is much better than whatever IDEA/Clion uses IME.

You have to consider that both plugins were pioneered by the same lead developer, and rust-analyzer came as a second system leveraging things learned from the IntelliJ Rust project.

Is there anything other than performance and proc macro compatibility that RA has over IntelliJ-Rust? All of the alternatives to IntelliJ-Rust are just missing critical (to me) features like refactoring.

RA uses chalk [1], which is a trait solver rewrite for rustc. You can already use it on nightly with a feature flag.

So RA can get close to the trait resolution of the compiler, which is probably the most challenging part. I haven't used Intellij in a while, but I doubt they can ever get close with their custom implementation. I always had trouble with trait resolution/autocompletion, which is often where you need from the IDE the most.

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/chalk

When was the last time you tried RA? I ask because they've been adding features at a rapid clip, and lately they seem to be focusing on adding new refactoring features. I wouldn't be surprised to hear they still don't have everything CLion does, but I also wouldn't be surprised to see them get there before long.

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