alt Hacker NewsI 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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Recompile and hot reload, maybe. 2 seconds if you're very lucky. Many setups are much slower. I've seen some really cool projects over the last few years- things like tcc + hot reload that have really good turn around time.
But "live" is a whole different thing. And most languages aren't built with the expectation that you'll be patching it while it's running - at least as standard operating procedure and without nuking state.
And that's a key part.
I think you should be able to build an app and develop a game without ever having to restart them.
And that would come with new challenges and the need for new tooling / constructs. E.g. When you change a type / structure, and there's existing state, what happens? (migration, deletion etc)
If you think that feels different download and fire up Squeak which is to Lisp as Lisp is to the recompile and rerun languages.
Well, for me it’s not enough because I need to get back to where I was, repeating the same actions so it gets to the same state. With live dev I don’t need this, or a history replay method. I only update the running code. Heck I could also update the in memory var too if so I want.
It’s good that it’s fast. Still no good enough!