Creator here - haven't had a chance to write up a blog post yet! Stay tuned.
The gist of it is that we intercept the Rust linking phase and then drive `rustc` manually. There's some diffing logic that compares assembly between compiles and then a linking phase where we patch symbols against the running process. Works across macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and WASM. On my m4 I can get 130ms compile-patch times, quite wicked stuff.
We handle the hard parts that the traditional dylib-reloading doesn't including TLS, statics, constructors, etc.
I've been posting demos of it to our twitter page (yes twitter, sorry...)
I tried out Dioxus 0.6 last year, and was really impressed with the hot reloading support.
But Dioxus 0.6 only supported hot reloading templates; Allowing you to hot-reload code too... This is absolutely next level.
Of all the rust GUI frameworks I experimented with, Dioxus was by far the best. I ended needing to going with Qml for my project, but I'm probably look into Dioxus again if I have a project with different requirements.
1oooqooq · 2h ago
can't access the xitter posts... is the axum part using the whole of dioxus or bare axum + code reloading?
jkelleyrtp · 2h ago
There's a custom `axum::serve` equivalent we built that wraps the router construction in a hot-patchable function. When the patches are loaded, we reset the TCP connections.
It's a little specific to how dioxus uses axum today, but we plan to release an axum-only integration in the future.
modeless · 2h ago
Interesting, but the documentation makes it sound like you have to preemptively wrap all the code you think you might want to change in a special wrapper "call" function. If true that makes this a lot less appealing than existing solutions for other languages that can modify any function without special annotations.
jkelleyrtp · 2h ago
You basically need to wrap your program's `tick()` function. Otherwise you might be in the middle of malloc, hot-patch, and your struct's layout and alignment changes, and your program crashes due to undefined behavior.
The goal is that frameworks just bake `subsecond::current` into their `tick()` function and end-users get hot-patching for free.
No comments yet
weinzierl · 3h ago
Very nice. For a long time I wondered who would use hotpatching but working with large Java applications made me appreciate the possibility even if it is not 100% reliable (as it is in Java).
From the docs Subsecond looks almost perfect. The only downside I found is that (if I understood correctly) you have to modify the function call in the source code of every function you want to hotpatch.
It is a bit mitigated in that the change does not cost anything in release builds, but it still is a big thing. Do I want sprinkle my code with call for every function I might potentially have to patch in a debugging session?
jkelleyrtp · 2h ago
Creator here - you only need one `subsecond::call` to hook into the runtime and it doesn't even need to be in your code - it can be inside a dependency.
Currently Dioxus and Bevy have subsecond integration so they get automatic hot-patching without any end-user setup.
We hope to release some general purpose adapters for axum, ratatui, egui, etc.
weinzierl · 2h ago
Very nice! Thanks.
mmastrac · 5h ago
I'll have to give this a shot for some of the Rust server work I'm doing. progscrape.com uses a lot of tricks to boot quickly specifically because of the edit-compile-run cycle being slow (mostly deferred loading of indexes, etc).
My current day job @ Gel has me working on a Rust socket frontend for some pretty complex code and that could also be pretty interesting.
It seems to require that you choose a good "cutover" point in your codebase, but TBH that's probably not too hard to pick. The HTTP service handler in a webserver, the socket handlers in non-web serving code, etc.
It does appear to have a limitation where it will only allow the main crate to be hotpatched. That's less than ideal, but I suppose the convenience might justify some code structure changes to allow that.
prideout · 3h ago
Neat but I would prefer simply using a dylib for the part of my code that I want to be reloadable.
The gist of it is that we intercept the Rust linking phase and then drive `rustc` manually. There's some diffing logic that compares assembly between compiles and then a linking phase where we patch symbols against the running process. Works across macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and WASM. On my m4 I can get 130ms compile-patch times, quite wicked stuff.
We handle the hard parts that the traditional dylib-reloading doesn't including TLS, statics, constructors, etc.
I've been posting demos of it to our twitter page (yes twitter, sorry...)
- With bevy: https://x.com/dioxuslabs/status/1924762773734511035
- On iOS: https://x.com/dioxuslabs/status/1920184030173278608
- Frontend + backend (axum): https://x.com/dioxuslabs/status/1913353712552251860
- Ratatui (tui apps): https://x.com/dioxuslabs/status/1899539430173786505
Our unfinished release notes are here:
https://github.com/DioxusLabs/dioxus/releases/tag/v0.7.0-alp...
More details to come!
But Dioxus 0.6 only supported hot reloading templates; Allowing you to hot-reload code too... This is absolutely next level.
Of all the rust GUI frameworks I experimented with, Dioxus was by far the best. I ended needing to going with Qml for my project, but I'm probably look into Dioxus again if I have a project with different requirements.
It's a little specific to how dioxus uses axum today, but we plan to release an axum-only integration in the future.
The goal is that frameworks just bake `subsecond::current` into their `tick()` function and end-users get hot-patching for free.
No comments yet
From the docs Subsecond looks almost perfect. The only downside I found is that (if I understood correctly) you have to modify the function call in the source code of every function you want to hotpatch.
It is a bit mitigated in that the change does not cost anything in release builds, but it still is a big thing. Do I want sprinkle my code with call for every function I might potentially have to patch in a debugging session?
Currently Dioxus and Bevy have subsecond integration so they get automatic hot-patching without any end-user setup.
We hope to release some general purpose adapters for axum, ratatui, egui, etc.
My current day job @ Gel has me working on a Rust socket frontend for some pretty complex code and that could also be pretty interesting.
It seems to require that you choose a good "cutover" point in your codebase, but TBH that's probably not too hard to pick. The HTTP service handler in a webserver, the socket handlers in non-web serving code, etc.
It does appear to have a limitation where it will only allow the main crate to be hotpatched. That's less than ideal, but I suppose the convenience might justify some code structure changes to allow that.