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Comment by brunoborges

1 day ago

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.

23 comments

brunoborges

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pdpi  1 day ago

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.

  • isolay  1 day ago

    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.

    • bluGill  1 day ago

      Most people don't have a choice. Corporate IT has choosen what I run my machine on. I have used a native linux machine, but since my email is still on outlook, everybody uses teams, and all the non-code documents are on windows I end up having to have a windows machine. Linux in a VM under windows ends up being the easiest workflow (though I'm just starting to try WSL and so far it is looking good)

      7 replies →

    • vouwfietsman  21 hours ago

      This kind of stuff is why its hard to have good conversations about tooling. Windows is the best place for many kinds of software dev, but perhaps not the kind you are doing.

      5 replies →

    • pjmlp  5 hours ago

      Plenty of us do, so far Valve has failed to make native builds for Linux appealing for game studios, even though they already have to deal with similar APIs on Android, iDevices and PS/Switch.

    • neutronicus  1 day ago

      Visual Studio brings a lot to the table for C++ development. Specifically the Debugger, although IntelliSense also often succeeds at queries that stump clangd.

      If they can replicate that capability, I think it can be a draw.

      I was a mac / Linux guy before my current gig, but Visual Studio is so much more capable than XCode that I basically only use the Windows machine except to debug mac-specific issues. Less so, now, admittedly, that the malware scanner process is literally always pegging a CPU core.

not_a9  1 day ago

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

  • pjmlp  5 hours ago

    Hot code reloading, and incremental linking would be great, given the build times.

jiggawatts  13 hours ago

> 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.