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Comment by sugarpile | Hacker News Reader

For anyone reading the comments with the assumption the OP link is just for the longstanding rust plugin, it is. Do not take the comment above to mean a standalone rust IDE, a la Goland, was announced. Hopes lifted, hopes dashed.

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They do generally try to keep IDEs focused on a topic, for example how Rider has the role of supporting both Unity (C#) as well as Unreal (C++) projects since the the folks who seem to work closely with Rider seem to be their game development SMEs.

Similarly for Rust, I figure CLion is the best bet?

You would use the LLDB debugger backend similar to your C/C++ projects you would work on with CLion.

Quite a few rust projects do touch or at least reference C projects etc...

> Similarly for Rust, I figure CLion is the best bet?

Yeah. IntelliJ Ultimate is also decent with Rust, but debugging & profiling support is better with CLion.

Is it notably better? I've always used IDEA ultimate since I already have it installed but that's the second comment I've seen today touting improved debugging experience. Any things you'd call out? I've never felt it's deficient in IDEA but better profiling would be a huge selling point.

IntelliJ ultimate is probably the one exemption, being possible to be turned into the kitchen sink IDE with the right plugins. It still maintains some of its java first nature more than the language specific quirks though, I remember IntelliJ plus the python plugin used to have the hierarchy of package and module labels inverted to what Python actually does because the labels were created with Java in mind. (It was some time ago now though, so maybe they've fixed that specific example)

I'm pretty sure they're looking into creating an official one now. I recently received an email survey asking about using Rust and which IDE I use from JetBrains. I wouldn't be surprised if an official one comes out in the next year.

Why would you like a standalone IDE instead? You'd have to pay another license instead of using an existing one.

My perspective (as a die-hard JetBrains evangelist) is that the "focused" IDEs tend to have easier mental models to map onto the underlying language, versus trying to find the 8 panel's deep dialog that configures the facets for the plugin you care about. That's not even comparing the "what is happening here?!" difference between the plugin versions and the version bundled in the standalone IDE[1]. I would suspect over sufficient spans of time they may converge, but for the most part the standalone IDE bundle is actually QA-ed and the plugins are "well, it compiled!" (or at least that's how it seems from the outside)

The advantage of using the plugins in IJ (or I guess CLion in this case) is heterogeneous development is a little easier if one already has IJ muscle memory in ways that are similarly awkward to do in in the focused distributions

1: to this very second the virtualenv management difference between PyCharm and the python plugin make me chose PyCharm 100% of the time

Largely what commenter above says. Also, the full-featured IDEs signal, and back up IME, a higher level of polish and investment.

Also, I _love_ JetBrains and have access to two different all products pack licenses (one personal, one from my employer) so there is no additional license concern.

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