I find hot-reloading a very useful feature that speeds up development and makes debugging easier. I use it extensively in C#, and I wanted to have the same feature in Rust, so I created a crate for it: hotcode.
It provides a single attribute, #[hotreload], that can be applied to any function in a [lib] crate. It makes annotated functions hot-reloadable:
use hotcode::hotreload; #[hotreload] fn get() -> i32 { 1 } impl Struct { #[hotreload] fn get(&self) -> i32 { self.value } } impl Trait for Struct { #[hotreload] fn get(&self) -> i32 { self.value + 1 } } Your library crate must also be built as both a cdylib and an rlib:
[lib] crate-type = ["cdylib", "rlib"] You can now run your application and make changes to your library without restarting it. hotcode will automatically apply those changes.
Here's a usage example - a rasterization function being hot-reloaded in a software renderer:
hotcode works by swapping dynamic libraries from a separate file-watcher thread - the same principle that has been used by other hot-reloading libraries, such as hot-lib-reloader-rs and rust-hot-reloading. This approach was also explained in this blogpost.
Source repository: GitHub - alordash/hotcode: Library for hotreload in Rust · GitHub
Crate documentation: hotcode - Rust
I hope this helps someone speed up their development iterations! 
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