rust-analyzer VS vscode-rust

Compare rust-analyzer vs vscode-rust and see what are their differences.

rust-analyzer

A Rust compiler front-end for IDEs (by rust-lang)

vscode-rust

Rust extension for Visual Studio Code (by rust-lang)
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rust-analyzer vscode-rust
132 8
13,479 1,401
2.4% -
10.0 4.4
1 day ago over 1 year ago
Rust TypeScript
Apache License 2.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

rust-analyzer

Posts with mentions or reviews of rust-analyzer. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-18.

vscode-rust

Posts with mentions or reviews of vscode-rust. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-08-24.
  • Pinecone: Rust – A hard decision pays off
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Aug 2022
    > it crashes process IDs more often than Justin Bieber crashes Maseratis: https://github.com/rust-lang/vscode-rust/issues/890

    So -- this guy used an extension (named Rust) with rust-analyzer, which was known to not work, and it didn't work(!), and the Rust extension author recommends he tries the extension made for rust-analyzer. That extension doesn't have the features he likes (it works for me and has loads of features, so I have no idea what this is about?), and so they close the issue?

    Hardly a case for the ages. Guy uses unsupported config and things don't work?

    > What clangd does is work.

    Don't doubt it. I'm just saying -- I haven't had any problems with the rust-analyzer extension since it became the Rust default. But, yes, I had a few hiccups and crashes beforehand, no doubt. I just have to imagine it's both younger, and doing more/different things than clangd.

    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Aug 2022
    Well we could start with the fact that it crashes process IDs more often than Justin Bieber crashes Maseratis: https://github.com/rust-lang/vscode-rust/issues/890 (it’s always LLVM’s fault, I know). Or move right along to the insane configuration hacks that are mandatory if you want anything upmarket of VSCode (who doesn’t need a little practice with their Emacs Lisp), or the N^2 whatever that happens when you point it at bindgen output.

    What clangd does is work.

  • RLS Deprecation | Rust Blog
    2 projects | /r/rust | 1 Jul 2022
    I know. It's been argued for a long time. But at least if you follow the advice to install RA, it's fine. And if you don't, you won't be able to install RLS anyway, but instead get a helpful message pointing to RA.
  • rust-analyzer changelog #113
    4 projects | /r/rust | 17 Jan 2022
    But the last commit to the Code extension was almost one year ago (an URL update), a pull request for a pretty annoying issue was not merged in more than a year, and the only activity on the issue tracker is people complaining about old issues and sometimes me asking them nicely to try rust-analyzer instead (but only when I'm pretty certain that their issue does not happen in RA).
    4 projects | /r/rust | 17 Jan 2022
    If it was my decision, I'd include RLS, RA and also IntelliJ, since diversity and being able to use the tools you're familiar with (in the latter case) are more important than branding and ownership. This also seems to bite new learners now and then, while other Rust contributors feel it's not such a big problem.
  • rust-analyzer changelog #102
    5 projects | /r/rust | 8 Nov 2021
    It's been asked before: https://github.com/rust-lang/vscode-rust/issues/927. Basically, rust-analyzer is not (yet?) a rust-lang.org project and it's not even going to be mentioned in the official docs until that happens.
  • rust-analyzer changelog #59
    5 projects | /r/rust | 11 Jan 2021
    Yeah, see e.g. https://github.com/rust-lang/vscode-rust/issues/880.
  • rust-analyzer changelog #56
    3 projects | /r/rust | 21 Dec 2020
    RA will be merged with the vscode-rust extension and aims to replace RLS (tracking issue on the vscode-rust repo).

What are some alternatives?

When comparing rust-analyzer and vscode-rust you can also consider the following projects:

rust-analyzer - A Rust compiler front-end for IDEs [Moved to: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-analyzer]

intellij-rust - Rust plugin for the IntelliJ Platform

rustfmt - Format Rust code

sublime-rust - The official Sublime Text 4 package for the Rust Programming Language

coc-rust-analyzer - rust-analyzer extension for coc.nvim

eglot - A client for Language Server Protocol servers

typescript-language-server - TypeScript & JavaScript Language Server

tree-sitter-rust - Rust grammar for tree-sitter

vim-lsp-settings - Auto configurations for Language Server for vim-lsp

Neovim-from-scratch - 📚 A Neovim config designed from scratch to be understandable

Clippy - A bunch of lints to catch common mistakes and improve your Rust code. Book: https://doc.rust-lang.org/clippy/

intellij-lsp-server - Exposes IntelliJ IDEA features through the Language Server Protocol.