I ended up with a pretty sweet workflow that involved hot code reloading in a Clojure web app where I rarely needed to restart the dev JVM. It involved Emacs and CIDER and designing the app’s architecture in a certain way but I felt it was really worth it. That said, if I was using a language with faster start up time then I’d have just restarted after every major change and not even worry about this, but this has some benefits that don’t exist in that scenario.