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If only the likes of IDEA, XCode, and Visual Studio were able to do hot-reload and REPL based development like Smalltalk was doing in the mid-80's.

But no, the occasional oops need to rebuild the world, still happens.



Depending what you (incidentally) change in Smalltalk you also have to recompile all methods.


Indeed, however that is transparent to the user, the current IDE experience would be similar to getting out of Smalltalk and restarting it from scratch.


Being fair, that's not a typical need with code at application level.


These IDE's have been able to do this for 20+ years.

And they also do so much more than the rrb.


Do they haven't, not at the level that Smalltalk does it.

To affirm otherwise only reveals lack of experience on the matter.

No Smalltalk environment has ever shown an error message about not being able to do edit-continue/hot-reload/whatever.... after doing a code change in a debug session.

Nor are they capable of transparently exposing their internal structures in the debugging session.


Can you halt and open an interactive debugger in a green thread in a running production node that you can correct a method and let that thread continue running after that with these? Without interrupting any other thread of that node of course?


Yes and yes. On the JVM and .net. Has been feasible for a while.

It's also something that you should probably never do, so not really that useful or worth considering as a major advantage.


On the JVM only if you buy JRebel and even then there are situations where it doesn't work.

https://www.jrebel.com/blog/limitations-of-hotswap

https://www.jrebel.com/learn/does-jrebel-support-my-framewor...

On the .NET, I will let Microsoft's own words speak for itself,

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-hot-re...

> No matter how you use .NET Hot Reload please be aware that some changes are not supported at runtime and will prompt you with a rude edit dialog and require you to restart your app in order to apply. We’re still working on the feature and the documentation to detail what edits are supported. For now, start by reviewing our existing list of Edit and Continue (EnC) equivalent capabilities. Since Hot Reload is powered by EnC this will give you a good starting point for better understanding this new feature. For details see: EnC documentation.

In Smalltalk environments since the early 80's, it always works, there are no buts and ifs, or extra products to install.

As mentioned on another replies, it only shows you never used Smalltalk in production.


> there are no buts and ifs, or extra products to install.

So... moving the goal posts now.




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