I started learning Rust, and I found Visual Studio Code an excellent IDE for experimenting with Rust (in the future, I’ll also evaluate my beloved Eclipse).

I thought I’d share this experience.

Assuming you have already installed Rust, let’s create a project

Open Visual Studio Code in the “hello” directory

We get syntax highlighting for the Rust source but nothing more:

Let’s install the “Rust Extension Pack”, which includes several Rust-related plugins:

Returning to our Rust project, we can see that the “target” folder has been created with compiled binaries, thanks to the installed extension:

Moreover, we now have the code lens to run our Rust program in the Rust editor. And we also have hovering (and, of course, code completion!):

Moreover, we also get live validation in the editor with possible error markers and quickfixes when available.

Let’s run our Rust program and see the output (after compilation) in the Console:

Let’s try to debug it, and we get a message telling us to install another extension:

Let’s go with CodeLLB:

And here we are: I set a breakpoint, and the debugger correctly stopped there:

Happy learning and coding with Rust! 😉