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jasonjmcghee04/23/20256 repliesview on HN

Live development is still so under-explored, and is just so exciting to work with.

One of my favorite talks is "Stop Writing Dead Programs" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s) and touches on a lot of what could be in terms of live development.

Lisp is very well-suited to live development due to code being data, but live development doesn't need to be lispy.

I built a live development extension for Love2D which lets you do graphics livecoding (both lua and glsl) in real-time - every keystroke updating the output, (if a valid program).

https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/livelove

Here are some (early) demos of things you can do with it:

https://gist.github.com/jasonjmcghee/9701aacce85799e0f1c7304...

So many cool things once you break down the barrier between editor and running program.

I've also asked myself the question of, what would a language look like that was natively built for live development, and built out a prototype - though it's definitely a sandbox so haven't posted it anywhere yet, other than demos on mastadon.


Replies

adityaathalye04/23/2025

Jack Rusher's recent interview is well worth reading too (the "stop writing dead programs" guy).

> On the need to sustain your creative drive in the face of technological change

> https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/multi-disciplinary...

nb. I recently submitted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43759204

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J_McQuade04/23/2025

Oh wow, just had to log in and give you a high-five for livelove because this is the first I've heard of it and it sounds like the sort of thing I absolutely need to try out.

I remember giving Love2D a go a couple of years ago with Fennel and the lack of such a thing sent me grumbling back to Common Lisp. I'd never even have thought of building that functionality in Love/Lua myself - assuming it's something that the runtime just didn't support - and it absolutely would never have occurred to me to use LSP to set it up. I've not even used it yet and it's already doing things to my brain, so thanks!

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swah04/23/2025

I guess the prevailing worldview is that "recompile everything and re-run" is good enough if it takes 2 seconds. But agreed that it just "feels" different when you're doing live in lisp... I miss Emacs!

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chaosprint04/23/2025

There are similar trends in music and sound art, which can be experienced with Glicol (https://glicol.org/) as well as many other languages here:

https://github.com/toplap/awesome-livecoding

also this live coding book is free to read!

https://livecodingbook.toplap.org/

hyperbolablabla04/24/2025

Can't you just do live code reloading with a DLL? Have a small core which is the exe, and then all of the logic is a DLL which can be reloaded when the core detects changes to the dependent files...

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HexDecOctBin04/24/2025

Have you done some kind of a write-up on how to do this? Lua is popular enough that I suspect there might actually be a demand of a readymade library to use hot reloading.

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