Welcome to another installment of the Rust Foundation Member Spotlight series! These blogs aim to introduce our community to various Rust Foundation Member organizations and their leaders. In this installment, we spoke with Kirill Smelov, RustRover Team Lead at JetBrains — a new Rust Foundation Silver Member. You can find JetBrains' announcement of their Rust Foundation membership back in September here.
Keep reading to learn about JetBrains and why they decided to join the Rust Foundation.
Tell us about JetBrains. What does your organization do and who do you serve? #
Our mission is to make professional software development a more productive and enjoyable experience. We provide solutions that enable developers to stay focused on code design and the big picture. Among other things, we also believe that we excel at providing IDE solutions, and that’s why we’ve recently stepped up our Rust offering.
At JetBrains, we believe that mature tooling is an inherent part of a successful programming language ecosystem. Tooling becomes mature through active usage and user feedback. We’d like to encourage the Rust community to try new emerging tools (even if they seem slow or inconvenient at first), submit feedback, and suggest fresh ideas. Together we’ll be able to bring Rust tooling to a whole new level of maturity.
How is JetBrains using Rust? #
Most of our tools are JVM-based applications, however, we do have cases of using Rust in production. Namely, native launchers for our IDE using Rust. Our new up-and-coming IDE, Fleet, also uses Rust for handling file system access.
Can you tell us more about RustRover? #
RustRover is a dedicated Rust IDE by JetBrains which we’ve announced recently. We’re on the road toward providing everything needed for Rust development out of the box: completion, code analysis, refactorings, code generation, debugging, and much more. Rust is currently available as a Public Preview version. Find out more at jetbrains.com/rust.
Why did JetBrains decide to join the Rust Foundation? #
We’re always striving to go above and beyond to support the communities we serve. We’d like to see the Rust community continue growing. In light of this, joining the Rust Foundation just seemed obvious as a way to help further this aim.
What are your hopes for the future of Rust? #
Our own research shows that Rust is steadily growing into a mature industry-accepted programming language. The Rust ecosystem is on its way to providing everything needed for professional software development. We don’t expect Rust to become a complete replacement for other languages, but we clearly see its adoption in areas that were not anticipated originally, for example, web backend applications. Rust features such as performance and guaranteed safety enable its application in cybersecurity and operating systems. We’ll definitely see much more of that in the future.
Kirill, what is your personal favorite thing about Rust? #
Since most of us develop in Kotlin and Java, we rely on automatic memory management and garbage collection – something that is done completely differently in Rust. I believe that Rust’s precise memory control features, along with guaranteed safety, have their own areas of application. These features create unique challenges for us as Rust IDE developers, and we’re happy to tackle those challenges in order to provide a smooth coding experience for RustRover customers.
Welcome to the Rust Foundation, JetBrains! #
You can learn more about JetBrains and their use of Rust here and connect with RustRover, JetBrains, and Kirill personally on X (formerly known as Twitter).