← Back to context

Comment by swah

1 day ago

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!

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!

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)