Hotswap

[Tomas Abrahamsson]

> 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.

We've built a nifty little tool on top of reshd[*],
that enables us to connect to a running system, compile
and load code directly into all nodes from Emacs by
typing C-c k (instead of the usual C-c C-k).

One hacker here got so addicted to it that he
desperately wants something similar for Java, now that
he has to hack Java for a while :-)

The turn around time from edit to test is really short.


/Tomas

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[*] See http://www.erlang.org/user.html#reshd-1.2