[capdeck]

You are mixing "fancy tools for mature language" with core capabilities of another (that will enable even better fancy refactoring tools in future - tools that can make more complex refactoring tasks fully automated). If anything, the fact that what used to be an external tool has migrated to core feature in Rust is a testament to how forward looking the language is. Imagine what that will enable in tools to come!

[mzl]

I'm not implying that Rust should have these yet; I am fully aware that the situation for Java is different due to serious and long efforts in developing great refactoring tools.

The point I was trying to make is that the view that Rust is great for refactoring depends heavily on what one is used to. For example, as compared to any dynamically typed language, a strongly typed language will be better for refactoring.

Writing refactorings that work reliably is very complex, and I'm not sure if it is practically possible to write the same kinds of refactorings that Java has for Rust. Two of my favourite refactorings in IntelliJ are extract method (with automatic duplication finding) and inline method/expression. I think that such refactorings are a lot more complex to do reliably in Rust due to ownership and borrowing rules, unnameable types, and so on.

[estebank]

I fully expect rustfix to gain refactoring capabilities, even if haphazardly bolted on. Things like changing an owned field to become a borrow requires a lot of trivial changes that can be automated away (other than making sure the field been borrowed has an appropriate lifetime, it course) that for the most part rustc already emits as structured suggestions that other tools can use.