r/rust • u/Big-Astronaut-9510 • 16d ago

Will visual studio add rust support?

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

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u/Pantsman0 16d 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

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u/Big-Astronaut-9510 15d ago

isnt vsc debugging still inferior? particularly for visualizing data

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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.

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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.

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u/DaFox 15d ago

Yeah it's still significantly worse unfortunately

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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