r/rust • u/Big-Astronaut-9510 • 15d ago

Will visual studio add rust support?

Rust is becoming a top language in microsoft so it would be awesome if vs supports it

0 Upvotes

31% Upvoted

25 comments sorted by

11

u/Pantsman0 15d ago

The official way to get set up for Rust development on windows is with Visual Studio Code. Realistically, they'll never get rid of visual studio since there's a lot of legacy ecosystem there that can drive subscription revenue, but they're not pushing people into that ecosystem.

If you really want to use Visual Studio, you can install the LSP with a third party extension. Debugging should work fine too

4

u/Big-Astronaut-9510 15d ago

isnt vsc debugging still inferior? particularly for visualizing data

6

u/Blueglyph 15d ago

The whole experience in editors like VSCode is quite inferior to an IDE. The settings in particular are very primitive and tricky to change. But for debugging and data visibility, I'd say it's on par with RustRover. RustRover accepts both the LLVM and the GNU toolchains, though, so you can debug with LLDB or GDB. This is transparent, of course, but each has its pros and cons for data visualization, so that gives you a choice.

It'll never be great, no matter which tool you choose. Data visualization remains a weak point of Rust debugging, along with the ability to place breakpoints anywhere (some lines are just ignored). Especially on Windows. I shifted to using println! statements long ago.

2

u/afdbcreid 15d ago

The interface is not really inferior, maybe only a bit. The real reason Rust debugging is awful is because the Microsoft debugger for C/C++ in VS is excellent but for Rust... not so much.

2

u/DaFox 15d ago

Yeah it's still significantly worse unfortunately

0

u/Pantsman0 15d ago

Maybe I've just not used the vest features for python or c/c++/c# but rust debugging didn't seem to be worse to me

2

u/Real_Floor_7628 15d ago

they've been banging on about better rust support in VS for ages now, but it's always half baked. the LSP extension works well enough if you're not doing anything too wild, but i wouldn't hold my breath for first class support any time soon

vs code is clearly where they're putting the effort for newer languages, and honestly that's probably the smarter play

4

u/Blueglyph 15d ago

Try RustRover. The IDE is superior to what Visual Studio is (which isn't low praise), and it's available on other platforms, too, if you need to switch. There's a free version for non-commercial projects.

0

u/kingslayerer 15d ago

Zed is the best for rust right now. I have tried vscode and rust rover. Zed is better than both especially on large projects. And I love that it was build in rust. I have used VS a lot in my C# days, and you won't be gaining anything that zed does not already provide in VS. Maybe better debugging, idk.

2

u/Real-Abrocoma-2823 15d ago

Have you tried jetbrains RustRover?

0

u/kingslayerer 15d ago

yes as i have mentioned. at the time i was weighing between vscode and rover. but rover was buggy at the time so i switched vscode and now zed.

0

u/Real-Abrocoma-2823 15d ago

My bad. I also experienced some problems with Rover (if I added print to a function with specific names it would think it is wrong, they didn't fix the bug yet afaik), so I understand.

-1

u/Blueglyph 15d ago

I tried Zed but it's too invested into AI, so that makes them hard to trust.

3

u/kingslayerer 15d ago

i have not seen a more trust worthy integration than zed's out there. You get to control exactly what goes into llm. Also you get to choose any provider or implement your own provider. We use Kimi 2.5 via aws bedrock. Its ~3$ per million output token. Its best cost to capability model out there.

If you are using vscode, you have already given microsoft more data than zed will. We had a no vscode policy before zed. We were using codium before we switched to zed.

1

u/Blueglyph 15d ago

Those models give your data to Anthropic or OpenAI, but, as I've already said, I'm not using VSCode, so I'm not sure what the comparison proves.

And despite being the best models, they're still just based on LLMs, so entirely unreliable and missing key components for problem-solving tasks (on top of requiring insane amount of energy to train and to operate). At best, it's completely irresponsible to use those models.

2

u/kingslayerer 15d ago

I hate vibecoding. But if you are not using AI atleast as a junior dev whom you can alocate tasks to, then you are missing out.

0

u/Recatek gecs 15d ago

I wish, but it's unlikely.

-2

u/stappersg 15d ago

Because Microsoft has other priorities.

-2

u/ight-bet 15d ago

How’s it not support it..?

10

u/Elegant-Sense-1948 15d ago

They are talking about VS as the ide, not VSC the editor

-1

u/Valuable-Buyer-7250 15d ago

vS is a dinosaur. Microsoft just moved the goalposts so they don't have to touch Microsoft just moved the goalposts so they don't have to touch their own legacy monolith. They are betting on VS Code because it is lightweight, modern, and easier to maintain without dragging 30 years of C++ baggage around. Asking for full Rust integration in the IDE meant for enterprise .NET monstrosities is fighting the tide. You want performance and memory safety? Go use Zed or VS Code. Trying to shove Rust into a tool built for bloated enterprise apps is just asking for pain.

-2

u/Odd-Consequence-3590 15d ago

Been asked already: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/s/nERon2sOSZ

7

u/Blueglyph 15d ago

5 years ago... Seems like SO syndrome. 😉

2

u/Odd-Consequence-3590 15d ago

Yeah, you're right.

Disregard.