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0 pointslongemen30004y ago0 comments

Just to be clear Julia is "AOT-JIT", that means that the methods are compiled when used the first time. With Revise.jl (a package for interactive development) you can make a fully interactive Julia process, rewriting things on the fly, while benefiting from fast code

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freemint4y ago· 3 in thread

Running Revise in production sounds unwise (sorry for the pun).

Also you can very much not redefine functions on the fly due to world age (assuming the caller doesn't pay for invoke-latest).

ChrisRackauckas4y ago

You're not doing interactive development on production. Production is the case where you just build a system image and deploy it without compile times. This is done all of the time, for example with Pumas.

lukego4y ago

This is a binary view of development-verses-production. I appreciate languages that treat this as a continuum and let me make my own trade-offs.

Common Lisp, Smalltalk, and Erlang all treat the process as running indefinitely. This gives those languages a certain something special.

I was hoping to find the same thing in Julia. It's not there. It seems like a significant missed opportunity to me. These dismissive comments make it sound like you guys might not know what you are missing.

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freemint4y ago

In certain common lisp deployment you might do that.

There are legends from Common Lisp users where this is very much done.

> When one of the customer support people came to me with a report of a bug in the editor, I would load the code into the Lisp interpreter and log into the user's account. If I was able to reproduce the bug I'd get an actual break loop, telling me exactly what was going wrong. Often I could fix the code and release a fix right away. And when I say right away, I mean while the user was still on the phone.

> Such fast turnaround on bug fixes put us into an impossibly tempting position. If we could catch and fix a bug while the user was still on the phone, it was very tempting for us to give the user the impression that they were imagining it. And so we sometimes (to their delight) had the customer support people tell the user to just try logging in again and see if they still had the problem. And of course when the user logged back in they'd get the newly released version of the software with the bug fixed, and everything would work fine. I realize this was a bit sneaky of us, but it was also a lot of fun.

Taken from https://sep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt?t=163...

I know that this is not possible in Julia like that. But just because it's not possible in Julia doesn't mean what they did was somehow wrong when it worked well for them.

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