New IDE for Rust: Review of the First Beta Version of RustRover

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RustRover: JetBrains released a dedicated IDE for Rust

JetBrains, known for its powerful development environments (IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, GoLand), has officially released the first beta version of RustRover — a specialized IDE for the Rust language. This event was long-awaited by the community, which previously relied on plugins for IntelliJ or VS Code. Let's break down what this IDE offers and whether it's worth switching to.

Why is this important for the Rust community?

Rust is one of the fastest-growing languages, but its tooling has long remained fragmented. VS Code with the rust-analyzer extension was the standard, but JetBrains decided to go further by creating a full-fledged IDE. RustRover includes:

Intelligent autocompletion — real-time analysis of types, macros, and traits.
Project-level refactoring — renaming, extracting methods, optimizing imports.
Built-in Cargo support — running tests, building, and profiling without switching to the console.
Debugger — visual debugging with breakpoints, call stack, and variable inspection.

First impressions: what did we like?

We tested RustRover on a medium-sized project (about 50 thousand lines of code). Here are the key observations:

Speed — the IDE loads faster than expected, although it consumes about 2 GB of RAM (for comparison: VS Code — 800 MB).
Macro handling — RustRover correctly highlights and analyzes macros, including procedural ones. This is a rare feature even among paid solutions.
Smart hints — the system warns about potential issues with borrowing and lifetimes even before compilation.
Version control integration — built-in Git client and support for GitHub Actions out of the box.

Disadvantages and limitations

Like any beta version, RustRover is not perfect. The main drawbacks:

Price — a paid subscription is expected (about $15/month for individuals), although free licenses are promised for students and open-source projects.
Compatibility — there is no support for WASM and embedded projects (no_std) yet. Plugins for WebAssembly are expected in the release.
Heaviness — on weak machines (less than 8 GB of RAM), it lags, especially when indexing large dependencies.

Comparison with alternatives

For those choosing a tool, here is a brief comparison:

VS Code + rust-analyzer — lighter, free, but lacks a built-in debugger and refactoring.
IntelliJ IDEA with Rust plugin — almost the same, but the plugin is outdated and does not receive updates.
CLion + Rust — powerful, but geared towards C/C++ developers, the interface is cluttered.

RustRover occupies a niche between VS Code (free but basic) and CLion (expensive but for multilingual projects).