Hotswap

[Peter-Henry Mander]

Thanks for emphasising a point that I only hinted at.

Yes, prototyping _is_ much faster this way. Only once before I was able 
to work on a project that was developed in a similar manner in a 
Smalltalk-ish language, and the productivity of the tiny software team 
was absolutely blistering! I'm really happy I can work this way again 
with Erlang.

I can't imagine how you would do prototyping in C/C++, the 
code-compile-load-execute-debug cycle is sooooooooo long!

Pete.

Vance Shipley wrote:
> Hot swap is useful for more than constant uptime production
> systems.  When you are doing development on a system involving 
> more than a few modules/processes the startup time can be
> significant.  Just starting an erlang node takes a while.  I
> generally edit code in one window and then in another I am
> running an erlang shell on the system under test in which I 
> run c(module) which compiles and loads the new module.  You
> then test, edit, test, etc.  This iteration is really fast 
> compared to a cold boot of the erlang node and starting the 
> processes.
> 
> 	-Vance
> 
>