Rust Glancer

Rust Glancer Aug 21, 2026 Rust Glancer, a functional LSP server for Rust which uses two orders of magnitude less RAM, is incredibly cool. Go check it out! This post started as a comment on lobste.rs, but I figured it out that it’s better to publish it somewhat more prominently. Don’t expect polished writing though! Some thoughts: rust-analyzer uses rowan for syntax tree representation Yeah, rowan is garbage :P I was really thinking about incremental parsing, incremental, DOM-mutation style refactorings, And Rowan is pretty good for that. But that’s 1% use case. The 99% use case is all the code in your 6666 dependencies which you won’t ever look at, but which needs to be at least shallowly analyzed. Even for incremental tool whose main goal is refactoring, the primary AST structure should be just a list of arrays. There might be a real post about that at some point, see https://youtu.be/G93oYL1ry70 as a teaser. Rust workspaces genuinely have a lot of information that must be indexed:…