rust-analyzer.vs - Rust language support for Visual Studio 2022 / 2026

Download this extension from the Visual Studio Marketplace or get the CI build.

Supported hosts and prerequisites

One canonical Windows amd64 VSIX supports Community, Professional, and Enterprise with installation range [17.12,19.0):

• Visual Studio 2022 17.12 or later within 17.x
• Visual Studio 2026 18.x

The Core Editor, rustup on the Visual Studio process PATH, a default Rust toolchain, and operational Cargo are required. Nightly is optional and needed only for Test Explorer. See Prerequisites for official sources, install and upgrade commands, and verification.

RustDevelopmentPack is retired; install rust-analyzer.vs directly.

💡 Announcement

This extension is free & always will be. Rust developers must have basic end to end experience for free. But also there is soon going to be paid extension that includes all features in this + wsl/embedded/drive development + editor enhancements + templates + and many more.

Principles

1. Drive developer towards Rust community best practices.
2. UI and behavior parity with 'Open Folder' experience for a C# solution with multiple projects (unless it contradicts #1).
3. Enhance with Rust community tools sets e.g. fmt, clippy, examples, docs. etc.
4. Killer features e.g. ChatGPT integration.

Features

• Workspaces & super workspaces both fully supported (super workspace is a folder with multiple cargo workspaces).
• Intellisense / Auto-complete / Goto definition / Code actions / Find references etc. all features from Rust language server.
• Build, Clean (errors in Error list with details in output window).
• Debug & Run without debugging.
• Run, debug & manage unit tests from test explorer.
• Examples support (run & debug).
• Set additional properties for build / debug / run (e.g. command line arguments).
• Clippy / Fmt integration.
• Comment (Ctrl+K Ctrl+C) & Uncomment (Ctrl+K Ctrl+U)
• Infrastructure features
  • Extension Logs for debugging in Output | rust-analyzer.vs pane.
  • Test Explorer requires the optional nightly toolchain.
  • Tools | Options | rust-analyzer.vs

These features continue to get tested with top Rust OSS projects like cargo, ruffle, iced, geo, ruff, reqwest, wasmtime. There are bugs! 😉

Upcoming

• Cross compilation (wasm, linux, etc.) / build & run on WSL2 / leverage docker.
• Test experience enhancements (document and benchmark tests).

Probably never

• Basic project templates.
• ChatGPT integration.
• Folder enhancements (icons, context menus).
• crates.io integration.
• cargo management.

How can I help?

If you enjoy using the extension, please give it a ★★★★★ rating on the Visual Studio Marketplace.

Should you encounter bugs or if you have feature requests, head on over to the GitHub repo to open an issue if one doesn't already exist.

Pull requests are also very welcome, since I can't always get around to fixing all bugs myself.

Common links

• Open Folder extensibility is pretty much the only documentation apart from the sample code folks have written (see Acknowledgements).

Acknowledgements

• VS-RustAnalyzer for the inspiration and show how to write an 'Open Folder' extension.
• nodejstools for demonstrating good practices and utilities for writing extensions.
• madskristensen for being an immense store of extensions authoring tips, tricks & techniques.
• develop-vsextension-with-github-actions for the workflow scripts.
• vsixcookbook for the guidance and best practices.