nannou VS rust-hot-reloading

Another idea would be to do something with Nannou, it's pretty straightforward to get some visually pleasing results and I find these Processing/P5 inspired creative coding libraries allow for a lot of exploration and expression. The Coding Train is a YouTube channel which has dozens of these kinds of projects, translating them into Rust certainly is good exercise.

Assuming you’re talking about https://nannou.cc they advertise a slack, a matrix, and a github org.

Never used this, no idea If it's what you want, but maybe https://nannou.cc/?

https://nannou.cc/ may be worth checking out.

"creative coding" usually refers to a framework where a developer/artist can code up nice things quickly

for example https://github.com/nannou-org/nannou/blob/master/examples/dr...

I've exported individual frames using this mechanism, I've never tried gif encoding before but seems like there's support for it,

Yes https://fasterthanli.me/articles/so-you-want-to-live-reload-... (discussed here https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/j0ajdy/so_you_want_to...)

And then there's this crate https://docs.rs/live-reload/0.2.0/live_reload/ which works on the same principles as the article above, and is based on C code (i.e. the same approach works for C).

There's a bunch of other libraries that work the same way, and some example code that can do this. I can find https://github.com/irh/rust-hot-reloading and https://github.com/porglezomp-misc/live-reloading-rs and https://github.com/xixixao/hot-reload-rs

And then there's https://github.com/emoon/dynamic_reload which is perhaps better?

And there's https://github.com/draivin/rust-hotswap which has a nice API but uses a deprecated rustc internal API doesn't build anymore.

Anyway there was a library that did this in a more elegant way and I just can't find it (perhaps it was rust-hotswap anyway).

I see the Nannou part of your question was answered, but to the other part: You can hot-reload in a compiled language, I'd just generally advise against it without specific toolchain support or some other kind of runtime support (since this is a system language you can do it yourself). There are some people who do it, and more power to them. For example: https://github.com/irh/rust-hot-reloading