rust-script VS cargo-play

There is also rust-script[1] which runs "Rust files and expressions as scripts without any setup or compilation step." I wrote a data loader[2] in it for my Observable Framework project and have been very happy with its performance and overall ease including hot-reloading.

[1] https://rust-script.org

[2] https://observablehq.com/framework/loaders#routing

To address your concerns about non-trivial building process making Rust less suitable for small scripts : https://rust-script.org/ Work is actively being done. (not by me)

I started this as a little script made with rust-script, which took only a few hours to mock up, and then I was able to refactor the core logic into a much larger scriptable system over only about a day. And, Rust being Rust, it worked first time once I got it compiling! Also, I have to say, having a full-blown custom scripting engine just work is a novelty coming from web programming, and Rhai is a great choice if you need this sort of functionality in your own projects!

Use rust-script ! Instead of having a folder for each script, your script could be a single file, just like you would in python. Then you can put all the files in a single directory with a readme describing the functionality and use-case of each script.

In case you didn't notice in the Prior Art section, rust-script is the most actively maintained descendant of cargo-script (from which the cargo-eval crate is forked as well).

Someone even wrote https://rust-script.org/ to make that "shell scripting using Rust" use-case more convenient.

Is rust-script close enough?

That may have been more of the originator of the idea, but what I believe I had used was rust-script, looking into it more. That one isn't maintained.

If you want that, check out rust-script.