Rust, a Mozilla-sponsored language built for speed, safety, and ease of use, has been gaining traction with developers lately. But some have yearned for better IDE support for the language. That’s why Red Hat engineers and the Eclipse Foundation are considering a Rust-specific IDE project to meet this demand. Eclipse is using RedOx as a placeholder name for the proposed IDE project. Developers can download code from the Eclipse Marketplace.
If approved, the project would provide an environment for creating projects, debugging code, running test suites, and packaging and deployment. Development for Cargo, the Rust package manager, would be enabled as well. But IDE support for Rust crate management, used in Rust libraries, would not be addressed by RedOx. A decision on RedOx’s fate is several months away.
Eclipse said Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor has snagged a sizable portion of Rust development thanks to its integration with the Rust Language Server. That’s why the foundation sees an opportunity to build an language server-based plugin for Rust support in Eclipse.
RedOx is not the first time Eclipse has dabbled in Rust development. Eclipse previously had a Rust IDE, RustDT, but it is no longer actively maintained.
Note that there is no relation between Eclipse’s proposed RedOx project and the Redox OS project for Rust.