What is the best IDE for developing in Rust?

Tremaine Eto
cloud native: the gathering
12 min readMay 13, 2019

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Which Rust IDE should you choose?

Rust is, according to Stack Overflow Insights, the most “Loved” language of 2018 with an incredible 78.9% rating — Rustaceans out there are clearly happy on average. However, Rust didn’t appear in the same survey’s “Most Popular Technologies” section, indicating that the amount of overall users is still quite small.

It should come as no surprise after the survey then that many people are rushing to try it out, and when that time comes, the question inevitably arises: which IDE should you use to develop in Rust?

As of today, there is no clear monopoly on Rust IDEs and thus no clear-cut winner. As much as it feels like that can make it confusing, this can actually be a good thing as there are a variety of choices that will ultimately boil down to user preference.

This article will take a lot of internet opinions and attempt to illuminate both the pros and cons.

IntelliJ IDEA with IntelliJ Rust plugin

Rust with IntelliJ IDEA (credit matklad on GIPHY)

You can find the installation link here on the IntelliJ Rust website.

  • Open-source
  • Written by some JetBrains employees and…

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Tremaine Eto
cloud native: the gathering

Senior Software Engineer @ Iterable | Previously worked at DIRECTV, AT&T, and Tinder | UCLA Computer Science alumni | Follow me for software engineering tips!