Simple setup for debugging rust in VSCode

debug rust vscode.md

It appears that as of the time of writing this, there is no official rust debugger. Luckily, there are two generic debuggers which seem to do the job alright: GDB, LLDB. Setting up both of them is basically the same process. So far, I had a nicer experience with LLDB so that will be the focus.

There are a few LLDB debuggers available for VSCode. The one I decided to use was CodeLLDB (vadimcn.vscode-lldb), but once again all of them should work almost the same way.

Here is the .vscode/launch.json:

{
    "version": "0.2.0",
    "configurations": [
        {
            "type": "lldb",
            "request": "launch",
            "name": "Debug",
            "preLaunchTask": "build",
            "program": "${workspaceFolder}/target/debug/${workspaceFolderBasename}",
            "args": [],
            "cwd": "${workspaceFolder}"
        }
    ]
}

You may notice that I had a preLaunchTask defined. The reason for this is that LLDB doesn't know how to rebuild your code. It is necessary to define that process:

.vscode/tasks.json

{
    "version": "2.0.0",
    "tasks": [
        {
            "label": "build",
            "command": "cargo",
            "args": ["build", "-q"],
            "type": "process"
        }
    ]
}