Switching debuggers and renderers

Last modified: 29 January 2025

Debugger options

RustRover provides its own implementation of two debuggers: LLDB and GDB. You may or may not be able to choose between them depending on your OS.

warning

On WSL, you cannot use the RustRover debuggers. Make sure you have GDB installed.

On Windows, the toolchain configured for your project determines the debugger you can use:

  • MSVC toolchain. If you are using Rust's MSVC toolchain, you can only debug code with LLDB.

  • GNU toolchain. With a GNU toolchain, you must use GDB.

note

You can double-check toolchain settings in Settings | Rust.

RustRover will notify you if the active debugger does not match the project's toolchain:

Notification about a debugger-toolchain mismatch

Switch debuggers (Windows, Linux)

  1. Go to Settings | Build, Execution, Deployment | Debugger.

  2. Locate the Rust section and select the preferred debugger from the drop-down list.

    Switching debugger in the toolchain settings

warning

If you choose GDB, make sure MinGW is installed.

Install debugger for WSL

In order to debug on WSL, you must have a GDB debugger installed. to double-check, run:

which -a gdb

To install GDB, refer to the official GNU Project website.

    Rust type renderers (pretty-printers)

    You can switch the renderers RustRover uses to display Rust types in the Variables pane.

    Switch renderers

    1. Go to Settings | Build, Execution, Deployment | Debugger | Data Views | Rust.

    2. For the debugger in use, select an option from the drop-down list:

      Rust debugger renderers

      • No renderers. This option disables explicit rendering, leaving only the type support provided by GDB or LLDB natively. Because Rust type formatters are currently not available in LLDB and GDB out of the box, this option means no rendering for types other than C/C++ types.

      • Rust compiler’s renderers. With this option, RustRover takes pretty-printers from the standard rustc distribution and loads them onto the debugger.

        note

        There should not be significant difference between the Rust compiler's renderers and the bundled renderers (described below). However, we recommend using the bundled ones as they are being tested and verified by the RustRover team.

      • Bundled renderers. The IDE’s own renderers are implemented from scratch for both GDB and LLDB, unifying type representation for the two debuggers. These formatters build tree views for strings, structs, enums, and vectors, making it easier for you to look inside child elements.

        Bundled pretty-printers

        The bundled renderers also support standard library types like HashMap, HashSet, Rc, Arc, Cell, Ref, and others.

        Bundled pretty-printers