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Rust in Visual Studio and VS Code

Daniel Griffen has released a preview version of a Rust language service for Visual Studio. This plugin requires Visual Studio 2017 Preview, an experimental release stream for testing new VS features.

This isn’t the first time someone tried making a Rust plugin for Visual Studio. In an effort that stalled about six months ago, Andrzej Janik and Patrick Reisert were working on a project known as Visual Rust.

The difference with this attempt is that Daniel Griffen is able to leverage the Rust Language Server (RLS). Based on the Language Server Protocol, the Rust Language Server is designed to be an editor agnostic language service. This means any improvement they make for Visual Studio or VS Code could then be leveraged by Sublime, emacs, vim, and other editors. (Each editor will still need to provide a thin adapter plugin for communicating with the language server.)

RLS uses both the Rust compiler and Racer for data. Racer, or Rust Auto-Complete-er, is less accurate than the full compiler, but offers better performance. So, for operations where the compiler would be too slow (e.g. code completion), Racer is used.

The Rust Language Server itself is in early development, and the project is looking for contributors.

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