Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zvrba 5142 days ago
No, they aren't. With Java you can change code while the application is running and it will be hot-swapped after you have recompiled it.

I learned about this feature when playing a bit in Eclipse, forgot to kill the program between edits, and got a warning that the recompiled class couldn't be hot-swapped because its signature changed. And then I sat there in awe; I can just dream about this functioning reliably with C++.

2 comments

Microsoft Visual C++ supported "Edit and Continue" for many many years.
I remember using this in MSVC 6 - so at least 14 years ago.
"Supports", "works" and "is usable" are three totally different things. I doubt that E&C is truly usable since even much simpler things -- for example, data breakpoints when debugging native+managed code -- is unsupported in VS2010. (Needed exactly that today.) E&C is disabled also for C# as soon as you turn on native-code debugging.
Edit & continue is available with the V8 engine as well, so add JavaScript to the list of languages being unrighteously ignored.