Yeah the approach is restricted and more compiler support for this kind of workflow would be incredibly welcome. I wrote this in part to try to get more folks in the Rust community thinking in this direction. The hot-reload support that Zig is planning sounds really exciting and I would love for Rust to have something similar (one can dream, right ;).

That being said, you can still go quite some way with this approach. On the one hand, simply being able to twiddle an algorithm into shape is really handy when making a game, visualization or exploring data.

On the other hand, you can also serialize state or keep it in a generic form like a serde_json::Value. Serialization of course needs some kind of migration on the part of the code using it (if the data layout changes it loads an old version and needs to convert it to the new form) or defaults for newly added fields/types. However, this is true in general, even in other languages.