Jetbrains' refactoring tools have always been top tier. For years resharper was absolutely essential for C# development because visual studio just lacked good refactoring. VS has been catching up and has mostly caught up in recent editions but I doubt that would have happened if not for MS being able to see just how popular resharper is.

I'd hope that as Rust grows in popularity the tooling will come from that so I'd keep an eye on the intelliJ rust plugin or rider support for rust because as you say, it's really difficult to go from a day job where for example promoting a local variable to a parameter (with replacement at the call sites) just works to one where you actually have to think about manual refactoring.

One reason why I'm optimistic about Rust is because the team not only explicitly recognizes the need for advanced tooling (such as IDEs), but owns critical parts of the underlying infrastructure, such as RLS. If you want a language to have quality tooling, it needs to be designed for that, and there's no better forcing function for that than having to write that tooling yourself, or at least having someone who does on the same team, in constant communication.

> I'd hope that as Rust grows in popularity the tooling will come from that ...

Patches are welcome! https://areweideyet.com/

The Rust plug-in, is already quite nice, and getting better all the time. I use it from CLion, since that has integrated debuging support.

You are mixing "fancy tools for mature language" with core capabilities of another (that will enable even better fancy refactoring tools in future - tools that can make more complex refactoring tasks fully automated). If anything, the fact that what used to be an external tool has migrated to core feature in Rust is a testament to how forward looking the language is. Imagine what that will enable in tools to come!

I'm not implying that Rust should have these yet; I am fully aware that the situation for Java is different due to serious and long efforts in developing great refactoring tools.

The point I was trying to make is that the view that Rust is great for refactoring depends heavily on what one is used to. For example, as compared to any dynamically typed language, a strongly typed language will be better for refactoring.

Writing refactorings that work reliably is very complex, and I'm not sure if it is practically possible to write the same kinds of refactorings that Java has for Rust. Two of my favourite refactorings in IntelliJ are extract method (with automatic duplication finding) and inline method/expression. I think that such refactorings are a lot more complex to do reliably in Rust due to ownership and borrowing rules, unnameable types, and so on.

I fully expect rustfix to gain refactoring capabilities, even if haphazardly bolted on. Things like changing an owned field to become a borrow requires a lot of trivial changes that can be automated away (other than making sure the field been borrowed has an appropriate lifetime, it course) that for the most part rustc already emits as structured suggestions that other tools can use.

IntelliJ plugin for Rust can do some refactoring (renaming functions and variables - it's all I use and remember).

For Rust development I use CLion with the Rust plugin, and it is getting better and better all the time.

It is interesting seeing the difference in peoples expectations on what an IDE can and should be able to do for you depending on what they are used to working with.