Faster Rust Tests With cargo-nextest | The RustRover Blog

The recent JetBrains livestream featured a conversation between Vitaly Bragilevsky and Rain, the creator of cargo-nextest, focusing on Rust testing and developer tools. cargo-nextest, a next-generation test runner, is designed to enhance the speed, observability, and reliability of Rust test executions, particularly for large projects and CI pipelines. With its integration in RustRover 2026.1, developers can now manage nextest sessions within the IDE, complete with progress reporting and structured results. Rain's journey into Rust began at Meta while working on a Mercurial server, leading to a deeper involvement with the language. cargo-nextest addresses the limitations of the traditional cargo test by providing faster test runs, better handling of flaky tests, and improved debugging capabilities through features like run recording and Perfetto trace output. It is particularly beneficial for large codebases and complex testing environments, offering extensibility and integration with other tools. Despite the complexity involved in building cargo-nextest, the tool aims to improve the overall developer experience by making test processes more efficient and transparent.