Sure. But JVMs haven't. (Unless you paid for something like JRebel, which has its own issues.)

Thomas is a genius and extremely nice to boot. He deserves to be more widely known.

I have tried many times to get JRebel to work properly. So, I gave up as the docs are horrible. It (JRebel) uses an agent to do the hot swapping instead of modifying the jvm.

I grabbed DECVM (and unfortunately I had to grab ICED Tea to run it on OS X, so this limits my use) and it works wonderfully so far. The only thing that JRebel does offer, that perhaps some of us will figure out for DECVM, is reloading Spring configurations. Since a lot of us are using DI, the DECVM tool only gets us to point, then the wonderful JVM restart has to happen.

Ah, yes. I meant to include that in my comment but I was on my mobile phone and too lazy.

Both could have been included in the headline, though.

Smalltalk is not statically typed, which I guess makes hotswapping a lot easier.

It's also a miniscule part of the market.

So you mean simplicity actually makes a lot of features easier? No shit :)

I don't see what market share has to do with the issue at all.