I started ramping up on a Rust codebase last week. Intellij is my default IDE so I just continued with it. The plugin seems reasonable enough. It does all the basics like checking types etc.

Do you have access to CLion or just Intellij? I ask because CLion has real debugging support that, to my knowledge, Intellij does not have (CLion has built in ties to GDB that the other lacks).

I pay for the 'Ultimate' edition which means the different language support is available via plugins. At my day job I toggle between GO & Typescript and some JAVA side projects so setup works well enough for me.

I can't speak to CLion. I use the Go debugger daily and I don't have 'GoLand' perse, just the plugin.

I can speak for you; you won't get a debugger with the Rust plugin with IntelliJ. I'm going from memory here, and it's been a few months, but I believe the person working at JetBrains on the Rust plugin said it wasn't going to come out for IntelliJ.

My company is good about buying us tools, so they got me CLion (or, rather, the entire Jetbrains Ultimate Pack or whatever it's called). CLion has made Rust development almost infinitely better than it was just using the Rust plugin on IntelliJ (and this is coming from someone who just uses the Python plugin in IntelliJ even though like 50-75% of his code is Python). I'm a JVM dev masquerading as a Python dev and using Rust for some stuff that Python just isn't up to snuff on (and using the super sweet pyo3 package to make native python modules for it, too). The point is, I get the <3 for IntelliJ; I pay for the super ultimate edition for home use just because I like it _that_ much. But CLion and debugging has made my life so much better than doing it with the Rust plugin in IntelliJ or using VS Code.

Some people are content with log statements, but I'd rather stab myself than debug via logs. It's just not my jam!

Edit: I just thought to note that the CLion + Windows + Debugger game is weaksauce. There may be a way to get it to work in windows, but I don't know a single thing about the Visual Studio build tools or how to get everything to play nice or whatever that might be necessary, so I tried to get it to work through WSL. It worked sometimes, and not others, and I got so frustrated I picked up a Mac for my work refresh rather than another surfacebook, mostly because I was tired of having to jump through hoops to sometimes have a mostly working eventually kinda debugger.

The rust plugin updated today with debug support for IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate

So yeah - nevermind about CLion! I do think it works better than IntelliJ, but it's a subtle, not-easily-quantifiable thing, and it's probably not worth buying it if you're just dabbling and also have IntelliJ Ultimate.