Rust Testing Gets Major Speed Boost: Cargo-nextest Now Integrated in JetBrains RustRover
Breaking: RustRover 2026.1 Ships Native Cargo-nextest Support
JetBrains RustRover 2026.1 now natively supports cargo-nextest, a next-generation Rust test runner that can be up to three times faster than standard cargo test, according to its creator Rain. The integration was announced in a recent JetBrains livestream featuring Rain, a veteran software engineer with over a decade of experience at Mozilla, Meta, and Oxide Computer Company.
“There is a lot of CI focus in cargo-nextest, but there is also a lot of attention paid to the local interactive developer experience,” Rain said during the session. The tool is designed to make Rust test execution faster, more observable, and more reliable—especially for large codebases and complex CI pipelines.
RustRover users can now run and monitor nextest sessions directly from the IDE, with progress reporting and structured results in the Test tool window. This marks a significant step for developers wrestling with the performance and visibility limitations of the default cargo test command.
Background: The Scale Problem in Rust Testing
Rust’s default test runner, cargo test, becomes sluggish as projects grow. Large codebases with thousands of tests and integration tests can see CI pipelines grinding to a halt. Rain first encountered this challenge while working on source control infrastructure at Meta in 2017.
“I learned Rust to kind of work on this thing. As I was developing it, I fell in love with Rust and decided to go deeper into it,” Rain explained. That project—building a Mercurial server in Rust—exposed the need for a test runner that could handle scale without sacrificing developer feedback loops.
Cargo-nextest was born to solve that gap. In benchmarks, it delivers up to 3x speedups over cargo test, depending on workload and project structure. It also offers advanced features like fine-grained test filtering, serial execution control, and rich output for CI.
What This Means for Rust Developers
The native RustRover integration eliminates the friction of switching between terminal and IDE for test runs. Developers can now iterate faster, especially in large monorepos or projects with hundreds of integration tests.
Rain, who now works at Oxide Computer Company where Rust is used from embedded firmware to higher-level control plane software, emphasized that nextest is built for both local and CI environments. “There is a lot of CI focus, but also a lot of attention paid to the local interactive developer experience,” he reiterated.
The move signals that the Rust ecosystem is maturing to meet enterprise-scale demands. For teams already using cargo-nextest in CI, the IDE support will reduce context switching. For new adopters, the barrier to faster testing just dropped significantly.
For those who missed the livestream, the full recording is available on JetBrains TV. RustRover 2026.1 is rolling out now, and existing users can enable cargo-nextest support from the IDE settings.
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