Building RustLand - A Professional IDE for Rust I

I have been a loyal user of JetBrains IDEs as they are undoubtedly amazing. I enjoyed using IntelliJ Rust, alas it does not feel as satisfying than a standalone IDE dedicated for the programming language. Hence, the idea of building an IDE for the Rust programming language surfaced.

This blog series will document my experiences when working with the intellij-community codebase, as I have to due to the fact that I will be building RustLand on top of IntelliJ. The process of building a custom standalone IDE is not documented so this is pretty much crossing the river by touching the stones.

Step 1: Cloning the Repository

The first step is of course cloning the intellij-community Repository. it is quite a large one, so I cloned it with depth 1. Cloning the repository takes a while because it is quite big even without all the history.

Step 2: Getting the Android Plugin

Apparently the Android plugin is not included anymore in the source tree. I had to manually get the plugin by cloning the Android plugin repository.

Step 3: Getting JBR 17

The JetBrains IDEs utilize their home-grown Java Runtime Environment, the JetBrains Runtime. It is recommended to use them for the development of custom IDEs as well. Builds of the JetBrains Runtime can be obtained in the releases page.

Step 4: Opening the Project

After all the aforementioned setup, it is time to open the project in IntelliJ IDEA 2022.1. I personally use 2023.1 at the time of writing, so I will be using that.

Attached below is the screen after opening up the project:

The next post will be about some actual programming so stay tuned! See you there!