Comment by toast0

> For a long time I wondered who would use hotpatching

As someone who used a lot of hotpatching and now can't...

This isn't aimed at production, but ... Hotpatching is essential to update code without losing program state. A lot of people work in http request/response stuff and program state lasts the duration of the request/response; you don't usually need hotpatching for that unless your responses are very long --- there's lots of ways to swap in new code where requests after some time hit the new code and requests that started in old code finish and that's usually what you want.

If you've got something with long requests and you might want to change things during the request, hot patching is needed. If you've got something with long running connections or some other elaborate session, hot patching eliminates a lot of disconnect/reconnect session movement and lets you get everything running on the new version with a lot less hassle; as long as you accept the hassles of hot patching.