A developer released Rust Glancer, an alternative Rust language server implementation that emphasizes low memory consumption, after four months of development.

Rust Glancer targets memory usage under 100 MB for typical projects and preserves indexing results on disk so that editor restarts do not require re‑indexing.

The project provides a full indexing pipeline with type inference and a trait solver based on Chalk, supporting most standard Rust syntax and common LSP actions such as go to definition, hover, inlay hints and completions. Benchmarks show indexing times of about six seconds and completion times of nine seconds on a 2020 MacBook Pro with an M1 chip and 8 GB of RAM, compared with six seconds indexing and thirteen seconds completion for rust‑analyzer on the same hardware. On a 2025 MacBook Pro Max with 36 GB of RAM, Rust Glancer recorded five seconds indexing and eight seconds completion versus six seconds indexing and thirteen seconds completion for rust‑analyzer.

The implementation is incomplete, contains known bugs, and lacks some advanced features such as build script support. The author plans to add performance optimizations, further memory reductions, improved type inference, code actions, and limited proc macro support in future releases.

Users can install the extension through the VS Code marketplace or build a VSIX package from the project repository.