[e_proxus]

I think you are seeing two definitions of "live reload".

One is where you live upgrade a full running release, including all applications and version, where you mutate state that had its format changed. All this in production, without any downtime. This is incredibly hard to get right. Erlang gives you a lot of tools (OTP & friends) to achieve this, but it is still very complex.

The other is reloading Erlang code in a runtime system. I.e. recompiling and reloading one or several modules in a runtime system. This is usually done during development (see Phoenix for Elixir for example) or perhaps even in production when you know what you're doing. This is relatively easy, with some risks of course if you are doing it in production.

[roller]

I haven't seen it used directly, but it seems like Elixir macro based code could be altered and recompiled based on runtime configuration.

An example would be changing log level settings. Normally Elixir log blocks can be compiled entirely out when running in production mode. But it should be possible to fairly safely recompile with debug logs enabled and reload without missing a beat.

[e_proxus]

We do this in our project, for two reasons. One for logging (as you mentioned) and the other for configuration (compiling configuration into a module for efficiency reasons). The Elixir primitives makes this a breeze.