Availability and quality of developer tools are an important factor in the success of a programming language. C/C++ has remained dominant in the systems space in part because of the huge number of tools tailored to these lanaguages. Succesful modern languages have had excellent tool support (Java in particular, Scala, Javascript, etc.). Finally, LLVM has been successful in part because it is much easier to extend than GCC. So far, Rust has done pretty well with developer tools, we have a compiler which produces good quality code in reasonable time, good support for debug symbols which lets us leverage C++/lanaguge agnostic tools such as debuggers, profilers, etc., there are also syntax highlighting, cross-reference, code completion, and documentation tools.
In this document I want to layout what Rust tools exist and where to find them, highlight opportunities for tool developement in the short and long term, and start a discussion about where to focus our time an
