[stcredzero]

> there are a number of areas in computer science where the leading academic papers are literally a good half decade behind the state-of-the-art that is buried in NDAs.

At a former company, I learned of the existence of a code packaging technology that would apply arbitrary code changes to a running VM instance atomically. By 2002, it was possible to implement a web application server whose pages were JIT compiled to machine code yet still upload and apply a code change atomically. With some care, transactions in flight could even be stopped mid-way and continue execution on the new code base. On top of that, it was possible to debug page renderings and change and recompile code in the debugger. Not so fancy now, but this was pretty slick in 2002.