alt Hacker NewsThe borrow checker is an example of a certain kind of reasoning that Rust benefits from. There's a reason a Lisp can be inspected and rewritten as the process runs, and it's the same thing that makes Rust difficult to rewrite in the same way. Not sure the exact term for it, but it's very easy to have profound nonlocal effects, for example with TAIT (type alias impl trait).
The borrow checker doesn't rely on interprocedural analysis. The function prototype provides all the information needed to maintain lifetime invariants across functions, so given static typing already then interprocedural borrow checking is effectively zero cost at compile time. (Cf. Intraprocedural, non-lexical borrow checking.) So borrow checking is no impediment to dynamically replacing function definitions. And it would be less of a headache for intraprocedural REPL but-for non-lexical semantics. But in a REPL you could always use an interpreter for running a function currently being edited, then compile it down once complete. REPLs are a headache for languages like Rust because of static typing generally, generics, trait semantics, etc.