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Comment by petilon

21 hours ago

If it is a tier-1 language why isn't it supported in Visual Studio?

Because it takes time. Even with coding agents, to add the capability. Then, there is the question on whether Rust developers who like to engage with Microsoft tools, would really consider Visual Studio as their IDE, instead of something like VS Code, VS Code Agent Mode, GitHub Copilot App, or GitHub Copilot CLI with simpler editors.

I'd be curious to know whether Rust developers believe Visual Studio is the right place for Microsoft to invest Rust specific coding capabilities.

  • There's two ways to approach this — build tooling for existing Rust developers to get them to adopt the Microsoft stack, or build tooling for existing Microsoft stack developers to get them to adopt Rust.

    I'd argue that the former is less important than the latter, and my understanding is that Visual Studio is still the IDE for Windows-centric development, so for those MS-first developers, Rust missing from VS means Rust is poorly supported, end of story.

    • It would have to be the 2nd option. Who in their right mind would voluntarily choose Windows as their dev env? It will have to be those who are already there.

      15 replies →

  • Visual Studio does have a really nice C++ debugger - one would imagine the C++ debugging capabilities should translate to Rust.

  • > Because it takes time.

    That's an excuse, not the reason.

    IntelliJ RustRover has been around for years.

    Similarly, VS Code has had Rust plugins written by the community in their spare time years ago.

Microsoft doesn’t use Visual Studio internally for many of its products such as Windows.

  • This is a shocking news to me. Can you elaborate with sources?

    • in Windows, some teams/people use it others don't. Historically it hasn't worked well with some of the internal build/test/etc stuff, that's mostly changed in recent years.

Given how long it took visual studio to get 64bit support, I wouldn't hold your breath!

( Edit: I should probably inform the layperson: It was Visual Studio 2022 )

It's only tier-1 for internal Microsoft use.

And for all we know, it might be officially supported in their internal builds of Visual Studio.

Because it is already supported in VS Code.

I don't think this is a hot take, but I'm predicting Microsoft will gradually phase out Visual Studio in favor of VS Code.

  • Agreed but I think you need to pry Visual Studio from VB.NET developers' cold dead hands.

    • C++ developers, too. I suppose they're splitting out the real powerful stuff (Debugger, LSP) for VSCode's consumption.

It is, with extensions (using rust-analyzer of course). I don't know what's the status inside Microsoft.