An Interactive Debugger for Rust Trait Errors
summary
Argus visualizes Rust trait resolution as an interactive proof-search debugger with complementary bottom-up and top-down views, provenance paths, IDE jump-to-definition links, and defaults that hide noise. It sorts hundreds of failing obligations using an inertia heuristic to rank likely, low-impact fixes, and demonstrates handling massive searches (example 26,000-node search tree). Evaluated on real and synthetic Rust tasks (N = 25), participants localized 2.2× localization more faults and localized 3.3× faster; fixes improve modestly and still require library API knowledge. Artifacts available.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (9)
- 0:00Rust trait errors intro
- 2:05Why trait diagnostics are hard
- 5:59Static diagnostics limits
- 6:41Introducing Argus debugger
- 9:54Bottom-up vs top-down
- 11:18User study method
- 13:43Results and impact
- 15:08Extending Argus to other domains
- 15:52Q&A
related talks
29mREVIS: An Error Visualization Tool for Rust
06m“RustRover in 2025: Code • Debug • AI”
25mAre we *actually* IDE yet? A look on the Rust IDE Story
40mWe deserve helpful tools
25m"Compiler-Driven Development: Making Rust Work for You"
25mLessons Learned From the Rust Ecosystem That Can Be Adopted Elsewhere
15mArgus: Debugging Performance Issues in Modern Desktop Applications...
38mAn Incrementally Spicier rust-analyzer