The rust plugin updated today with debug support for IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate
Re:Rust-analyzer – an IDE backend for Rust
by isbjorn16 on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @12:22PM
(#23008561)
That is fantastic news! I was curious when they added it and it looks like: https://github.com/intellij-rust/intellij-rust.github.io/com...
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.
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.