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>because it managed to get enough people to muster the huge effort that requires. Not really true on both counts: - you don't need _that_ many people, if you

>because it managed to get enough people to muster the huge effort that requires. Not really true on both counts: - you don't need _that_ many people, if you know what you are doing. For both rust-analyzer and IntelliJ Rust, the headcount was around one-and-a-half people between the first line written and the point where the thing basically works - the "mustering" only came together after the tools have proven themselves to be successful. _Today_ both rust-analyzer and Rust Rover have dedicated teams working on them, but it is a _consequences_ of the fact that these IDEs work great, not a cause. It was a shoestring budget at the beginning! Rust is not the easiest language to build an IDE for, but you really don't need a Google-level of effort for that either. What you do absolutely need though, is an _understanding_ of how to build an IDE, and that's very niche knowledge!

brabel 3y ago
A short history of the rust-analyzer can be found here[1]. > The rust-analyzer project was started at the very end of 2017 (first commit). At that time, the existing LSP implementation, RLS, had been providing IDE support for Rust for several years. By 2017, Rust had just basic IDE support with RLS and it was already quite popular. I completely reject your theory that the success of rust-analyzer is due to "the fact these IDEs worked great". It was Rust's success, even while having quite poor tooling, that brought people in to work on improving the tooling (to a point most other languages never reach). > it took surprisingly little effort to get to a prototype which was already useful as an IDE, which happened in Autumn 2018 So, yeah it takes little effort to get a basic IDE... that's where most languages (e.g. D, Nim) stop... the hard part is to get something that's really good. > At that critical point, the company Ferrous Systems (which was newborn itself) stepped in to fund further development of the prototype. So, rust-analyzer was not just a hobby project since at least 2018, when it got sponsored by a business. > By 2020, we realized that what we had built was no longer a prototype, but an already tremendously useful tool for day-to-day Rust programming. It took 2 years of work while sponsored by a real business to get to the point where rust-analyzer was considered "tremendously useful". That's a "huge effort" on my book, not Google-level (and I never said that), but huge nevertheless. And to get to the same level as you get with Java in IntelliJ, for example, you can be sure it'll take about as much effort as was already put into it, maybe more. [1] https://blog.rust-lang.org/2022/02/21/rust-analyzer-joins-rust-org.html https://blog.rust-lang.org/2022/02/21/rust-analyzer-joins-ru...
- deleted 3y ago
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- matklad 3y ago
  > It took 2 years of work while sponsored by a real business With a team of 1.5 people. I personally wouldn't call that amount of effort "huge", but adjective definitions may vary. The important bit here is "couple of people over couple of years" is what it takes to get a decent IDE support from zero for a reasonable language, provided that the initial architecture is right. > A short history of the rust-analyzer can be found To clarify, I am the original author of that text, rust-analyzer, and IntelliJ Rust. To add a little more details, the reason why rust-analyzer was started in 2017, is that before that I had been working on IntelliJ Rust. By 2017, IntelliJ Rust was already in a good shape! And the success of IntelliJ Rust was the main reason why folks were willing to pay me money for working on rust-analyzer. IntelliJ Rust was started on the 1st of September in 2015 (before RLS). No one used Rust at that point, not even for blockchain, and then I think it was impossible to predict with high level of confidence that Rust would be big. Even more so, I think both me and my manager at JetBrains were underestimating future Rust success at that time, as we were thinking mostly about relatively niche systems programming market, and didn't see that Rust would be a success as a general-purpose programming language with people doing web stuff in it (obviously, that niche would be occupied by Kotlin!). But funding one intern to hack on an IDE for obscure language in St. Petersburg was not a significant expense for JetBrains. And, given that the plugin was well received by then nascent Rust community, it made sense to gamble and to just hire the intern to be a full time junior dev. >So, yeah it takes little effort to get a basic IDE... that's where most languages (e.g. D, Nim) stop... the hard part is to get something that's really good. This glosses over an important detail: rust-analyzer was playing catch up with RLS, the work on which started roughly a year after IntelliJ Rust, I think in august of 2016. Unlike rust-analyzer, RLS was a real effort by the rust project itself, but it just couldn't be good enough, because the underlying architecture was not suitable for IDEs. Adding more effort to RLS wouldn't have helped, it was necessary to build a different thing. This I think is a bad equilibrium a lot of IDE efforts can get stuck in --- you really need to apply effort on top of the right architecture to not get stuck, but the knowledge of which architecture is right used to be very obscure.

brabel 3y ago

A short history of the rust-analyzer can be found here[1]. > The rust-analyzer project was started at the very end of 2017 (first commit). At that time, the existing LSP implementation, RLS, had been providing IDE support for Rust for several years. By 2017, Rust had just basic IDE support with RLS and it was already quite popular. I completely reject your theory that the success of rust-analyzer is due to "the fact these IDEs worked great". It was Rust's success, even while having quite poor tooling, that brought people in to work on improving the tooling (to a point most other languages never reach). > it took surprisingly little effort to get to a prototype which was already useful as an IDE, which happened in Autumn 2018 So, yeah it takes little effort to get a basic IDE... that's where most languages (e.g. D, Nim) stop... the hard part is to get something that's really good. > At that critical point, the company Ferrous Systems (which was newborn itself) stepped in to fund further development of the prototype. So, rust-analyzer was not just a hobby project since at least 2018, when it got sponsored by a business. > By 2020, we realized that what we had built was no longer a prototype, but an already tremendously useful tool for day-to-day Rust programming. It took 2 years of work while sponsored by a real business to get to the point where rust-analyzer was considered "tremendously useful". That's a "huge effort" on my book, not Google-level (and I never said that), but huge nevertheless. And to get to the same level as you get with Java in IntelliJ, for example, you can be sure it'll take about as much effort as was already put into it, maybe more. [1] https://blog.rust-lang.org/2022/02/21/rust-analyzer-joins-rust-org.html https://blog.rust-lang.org/2022/02/21/rust-analyzer-joins-ru...

deleted 3y ago
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matklad 3y ago
> It took 2 years of work while sponsored by a real business With a team of 1.5 people. I personally wouldn't call that amount of effort "huge", but adjective definitions may vary. The important bit here is "couple of people over couple of years" is what it takes to get a decent IDE support from zero for a reasonable language, provided that the initial architecture is right. > A short history of the rust-analyzer can be found To clarify, I am the original author of that text, rust-analyzer, and IntelliJ Rust. To add a little more details, the reason why rust-analyzer was started in 2017, is that before that I had been working on IntelliJ Rust. By 2017, IntelliJ Rust was already in a good shape! And the success of IntelliJ Rust was the main reason why folks were willing to pay me money for working on rust-analyzer. IntelliJ Rust was started on the 1st of September in 2015 (before RLS). No one used Rust at that point, not even for blockchain, and then I think it was impossible to predict with high level of confidence that Rust would be big. Even more so, I think both me and my manager at JetBrains were underestimating future Rust success at that time, as we were thinking mostly about relatively niche systems programming market, and didn't see that Rust would be a success as a general-purpose programming language with people doing web stuff in it (obviously, that niche would be occupied by Kotlin!). But funding one intern to hack on an IDE for obscure language in St. Petersburg was not a significant expense for JetBrains. And, given that the plugin was well received by then nascent Rust community, it made sense to gamble and to just hire the intern to be a full time junior dev. >So, yeah it takes little effort to get a basic IDE... that's where most languages (e.g. D, Nim) stop... the hard part is to get something that's really good. This glosses over an important detail: rust-analyzer was playing catch up with RLS, the work on which started roughly a year after IntelliJ Rust, I think in august of 2016. Unlike rust-analyzer, RLS was a real effort by the rust project itself, but it just couldn't be good enough, because the underlying architecture was not suitable for IDEs. Adding more effort to RLS wouldn't have helped, it was necessary to build a different thing. This I think is a bad equilibrium a lot of IDE efforts can get stuck in --- you really need to apply effort on top of the right architecture to not get stuck, but the knowledge of which architecture is right used to be very obscure.