Rust setup in wsl

rust with vscode

I installed the VS Code extension,

• rust-analyzer (for IDE support)

It provides lot of helpers, including refactoring that makes it easy to write code. This also puts a command in command pallet (ctrl+shift+p) called rust analyzer: debug which starts the debug, without setting vscode debug configuration which is nice!

But then it started becoming frustrating.

rust in wsl

Why do we need to even use wsl to build rust. It has to do with symbolic debug with vscode. In windows the default is MSVC-style debugging using cppvsdbg for debugging. Unfortunately with this many symbols were reported as "gotten optimized away". Even when cargo.toml contains,

[profile.dev]
opt-level = 0           # no optimizations
debug = true            # emit debug info (level 2 by default)

So, the common recommendation I found was to use lldb for debug. So I installed the VS Code extension,

• CodeLLDB (LLDB frontend)

Under windows, LLDB did give symbols that were missing before, but lldb was running so slow that it was almost unusable. When I tried in wsl under vscode, things were running very nicely.

Cross compile for windows msvc in wsl

But I wanted windows binary. Rust toolchain can compile for windows msvc target, but I needed to use msvc linker which lives in windows side. In order to use the linker in the cargo flow, I followed instructions from https://github.com/strickczq/msvc-wsl-rust for setting up the linker. In my case I use vscode. So I downloaded Build Tools for Visual Studio and then installed C++ Build Tools workload.

This setup works great.