February 2022 update: This post was written in 2019, and as such a lot of the tooling landscape around Rust has changed for the better. A new version of this post is in progress and will be linked here when done.
Rust is a memory-safe systems language that is blazing fast, and comes with no runtime or garbage collector overhead. It can be used to build very performant web services, CLI tools, and even Linux kernel modules!
Rust also provides an assortment of tools to make development faster and more user-friendly. I'll be going over some of them here that I've personally used and found to be amazing.
cargo-edit
cargo-edit is a crate that extends Rust's Cargo tool with add, remove and upgrade commands that allow you to manage dependencies with ease. The documentation goes over these options in detail.
I personally find cargo-edit useful in projects with a lot of dependencies as it gets tiresome to manually hunt down updated versions.
cargo-clippy
cargo-clippy is an advanced linter for Rust that brings together 331 (at the time of writing) different lints in one package that's built and maintained by the Rust team.
I've found it to be a great help alongside the official documentation and "the book" as a way of writing cleaner and more efficient Rust code. As a beginner Rustacean, I find it very helpful in breaking away from my patterns from other languages and using more "rust-y" constructs and expressions in my code.
rustfmt
rustfmt is the official formatting tool for Rust code. It's an opinionated, zero-configuration tool that "just works". It has not reached a 1.0 release yet, which entails some caveats with its usage but in my experience it will work for most people and codebases without any hassle.
As a Kotlin programmer I am very used to having an official styleguide for consistent formatting across all projects. rustfmt brings that same convenience to Rust development, which is major since Rust does not have any official IDE which would do it automatically.
rls
rls is Rust's implementation of Microsoft's language-server-protocol, an attempt at standardizing the interface between language tooling and IDEs to allow things like code completion, find all references and documentation on hover to work seamlessly across different IDEs. VSCode implements the language-server-protocol and integrates seamlessly with rls using the rust-lang.rust extension to create a compelling IDE experience.
Being a beginner, the ability for code to be checked within the editor and not requiring builds for each change is a huge speed-up in the learning and development process. Documentation about crates and errors being available directly on hover is certainly helpful in furthering my knowledge and understanding of the language.
Conclusion
So this is my list of must-have tooling that has helped me continuously improve as a Rustacean. I'm VERY curious to hear what others are using! I opted to stick with official tools where possible since they've proven very reliable and I seem to find considerably more help online with them, but I'd love to try out non-official alternatives that offer significant benefits :)
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