Re:Mono and WebAssembly – Updates on Static Compilation
by _sdegutis on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @04:40PM
(#16162944)
I ended up with a pretty sweet workflow that involved hot code reloading in a Clojure web app where I rarely needed to restart the dev JVM. It involved Emacs and CIDER and designing the app’s architecture in a certain way but I felt it was really worth it. That said, if I was using a language with faster start up time then I’d have just restarted after every major change and not even worry about this, but this has some benefits that don’t exist in that scenario.
I think any hot-reloading solution for a big, complex, introspective/reflective language is going to have some warts* and places where it stops working in some scenarios. The trick is just to minimize those to where they don't get on your nerves on a daily basis. C# will hopefully get there soon.
* Unless, that is the language is designed from the ground up to support code reloading. Erlang/Elixir's runtime inspection/injection/behavior alteration capability is second to none, and largely replaces the role of a true/traditional debugger. And you can do other cool stuff with it like zero-downtime in-place deployments, though that doesn't exactly come for free.