I'm coming from the opposite side -- my career has had me working almost entirely in compiled languages, mostly c but I've also done very low level embedded assembly and a fair bit of python. For personal projects recently it's been go but have also done some rust, haskell, and have played with some lisps.

I think the thing you're really talking about is getting fast feedback on a bit of code.

The two basic strategies I've adopted are (1) writing a very small, isolated, standalone program or (2) leaning on a test runner.

I use (1) when the snippet is a basic standalone piece of code. Either something that just uses fundamentals from the language, or in an environment where I can generate an executable quickly that is linked to the right libs. Then I can run it and see the output, often iteratively like `ls *.c | entr 'make && ./my-example'`. Sometimes this is also a convenient way to either step through a code snippet in gdb, or examine assembly output.

I use (2) when there are too many dependencies to make an isolated program feasible. I set up a test case to exercise my snippet, and either use a test runner's "watch" functionality or use entr like above, making sure to have the test selection set to only run my test (to keep the feedback loop tight). Then in one terminal I'm editing, and whenever I save I can see output in another terminal. The trick here is to avoid -- as much as possible -- rebuilding the whole system. If the thing you're working on is deep in a library, just build & run the tests for that library. Sometimes you still get burned by touching some file that requires recompiling a whole mess of stuff, but most of the time in my experience with a little bit of effort you can get the feedback cycle down to a small number of seconds.

> How do people develop in Rust? I'm trying to learn it, but it's hard to jump into code-bases and understand the code as I cannot run snippets.

Interestingly I had a VERY similar reaction when trying to learn lisp. I think it's a beginner vs expert kind of mentality. You have a certain mindset to be able to work with lisp, and don't even consciously think about all the little habits you have for working with it. I have a certain mindset to work with compiled static languages. One thing I struggled with in lisp was trying to keep track of what was exactly the state of my repl, given that I had experimented with a whole bunch of things. I found myself frequently having to exit and reload the repl, reload files, etc to get back to a known state, and then occasionally having to scroll back through my history because some critical piece of code that I entered directly in the repl wasn't saved in my source file -- or worse, some definition that was set in a previous revision of a source file (and subsequently removed) was needed so when restarting the system it was missing. And then it's a debugging exercise to try to figure out what critical thing is missing. I've watched people do dynamic development with lisp and it looks really cool but I have no idea how you keep track of what lives where! In my mind, it's a pure, clean slate starting with source files. (Except for environment variables, and the file system, and databases, and maybe the network, and ...)