Bacon – a background Rust code checker

I used to code with sublime and compile from time to time to check with compiler. Sometimes I’d go for an hour without running cargo and somehow it worked fine.

I have been doing rust since about 2016, in and out, and never questioned the approach but the tooling had improved dramatically in recent years.

I have switched to VSCode with rust-analyser and a few other extensions, which not only display errors but also types of variables which seems like a killer feature for me because it makes it so much easier.

I wonder what’s the motivation behind bacon given that it looks a bit outdated to program in rust this way in 2024.

Working on an OS in Rust, rust-analyzer chokes. A _lot_. I end up just having to run a compilation to see what I've broken.

Haven't tried it yet but it looks like it'll be an invaluable part of my toolbox. Thanks for posting this!

I love LSP as much as the next person, but bacon's flicker-free zero config clippy watching basically TAUGHT me Rust!

I use this exclusively in my IDE (RustRover). I've never had a recent IDEA that had a usable "problems" or whatever window. I wish there was a bacon for Go, too. I check for compile problems in Go from the terminal with AwesomeConsole or whatever it's called (in GoLand).

Bacon is fantastic. I always have it running when I'm writing Rust. It's very fast/performant.

I'd have assumed that using a language server would avoid the need for using something like this, but as a frequent user of ibazel (sort of inotify-watch+make for bazel) I can see how this can be enough to get productive without an editor that fully supports LSP