If you're continuously restarting, you're doing it wrong. That argument became invalid about 4 years ago I think around the time Eclipse Helios was released.
Now-a-days, starting a Tomcat or TomEE JVM in debug mode with Eclipse gives you the ability to hot swap probably 95% of your changes. It doesn't supporting adding completely new functions or changing declared fields. JRebel does support this though.
As a matter of fact, if you're in a stack frame and you pause the execution pointer with a breakpoint, you can completely change the code of the function and the JVM will discard the current stack frame and then restart the functional call. Essentially, you can rewrite your code, while it's executing, without losing your stack.
