It's useful for development environments to cache things which have not changed in order to shorten the feedback loop. Many do.
The problem is guaranteeing correctness. Correct cache invalidation is Hard(TM). Therefore, the CI system builds from scratch in order to guarantee a clean, correct and reproducible output from a given snapshot of the source.
As for 'live programming' against a running image, this write-up starts with the implicit assumption that this is always a good thing. While it can be useful on occasion, the reason for restarting the application after changing its source code is the same reason we favour functional, immutable styles: mutable state is a pain and it's best to push it out of the thing you're working with if at all possible. Modifying the running image risks ending up with internal states which no single snapshot of the source could ever have yielded.
People love to complain about Webpack, but it pretty much does all of this out of box, all the way down to hot-reloading UI components. In that sense it's way ahead of all C++, C#, Java, etc build systems I know.
Doing an `npm run dev` type of command in a reasonably set up JS project is very much this staged execution model the author talks about. Everything gets cached, on disk and in memory, only changes are recompiled, and reloads are fast, partial, and often hot-swapped. It's quite close to the maximum level of "liveness" I can imagine.
It's kind of amazing how JS took over older and more established languages in this sense - and we're still not content (judging by how popular it is to complain about webpack). This is great.
I’ve never had anything close to this experience with Webpack. In my experience all the magic “it just works” of incremental updates and live reloading is extremely fragile and just gives up silently all the time in large-ish projects. Adding to that, it’s incompetent at what’s supposed to be its core feature: bundling JavaScript modules. I would count it among the least reliable software systems I have to work with regularly.
I think what it does is amazing in terms of hot reload, etc. But yea, I always make sure someone on the team I am working on is a master at it, because some people are and some people aren't and if nobody on the team 'thinks' in the way webpack does, it can be terrible.
I understand where Webpack et al came from, but the more I work with it the less I like it. There used to be a time when the JS I wrote was the exact same that was executed. Now, even in development mode, it gets pulled through several tools (webpack/babel and a heap of their plugins, a minifier, source maps get generated etc) before my changes are visible, even in an incremental / hot reloading build.
It's not just build time, it's the indirectness. I'm seriously contemplating dropping it for a next project and just writing straight JS, whichever dialect (es6?) has the widest adoption.
Which is fine, if you have no need of any dependency management (stick everything in script tags and reference globals), your script is going to be made up of only a few individual .js files (every one has to go in the header), and you have no use for JSX or TypeScript.
For most people working on larger projects, though, the advantages of real dependency management (however broken NPM is) and transpiling JSX or TS is worth the compilation, which you get used to.
If you don't need backwards compatibility, you can use ES6 modules directly in the browser [1] and even load NPM packages in module format from Pika or Unpkg.
Living without a bundler was alright.
At my last job we checked Google Analytics and almost 100% of our users were on greenfield browsers, so we moved to that and had no issues.
You won't get what true "liveness" is until you work in Lisp or Smalltalk. The ability to change a function in a running program, without restarting it. Automatic reload might seem cool, but reload means your application restarts and loses state. Imagine you have some Web app and you open some menus/dialogs, perhaps it's connected to some server via WebSockets etc. and you find a bug somewhere, you go to the code to fix it, but reloading the page means you start from scratch and need to open again those menus/dialogs, and reconnect the sockets, in order to test your fix.
Common Lisp had true liveness for decades; it's almost mandated by the standard, it's designed in such a way that you can actually recompile a function, or even redefine objects, adding or removing properties or methods, at fucking runtime without restarting the application. Objects already instantiated will remain so and will be updated to reflect the change. You don't restart. That's the true "liveness", but seriously you don't get it until you try it, and once you get it you become depressed because you realize it doesn't really exist in any mainstream language.
JavaScript is some decades behind this dream, even with stuff like Webpack.
> You won't get what true "liveness" is until you work in Lisp or Smalltalk. The ability to change a function in a running program, without restarting it
This can be done in a number of other common languages today such as Java (JVM languages) and C# (probably all .NET languages). Most IDEs I've seen for those platforms support it.
Substantial enough changes to the code can require an application restart, but most changes you might make like changing the implementation of a function, adding new functions to a class, etc., will not. Hot Code Replacement (HCR) has been supported since Java 1.4: https://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_What_is_hot_code_replace%3F
Fully dynamic languages like Lisp and Smalltalk permit a greater degree of this than statically typed languages do, however, since they don't have types and a type system to wrangle with. When I've used it, hot code replacement supported most of the changes that conceptually make sense to support.
You'd be surprised to find out that Common Lisp has actually quite a strong type system (not Haskell-level but much better than C++/Java); just that it's optional. You get the best of both worlds — fast prototyping, and then when you decide upon the types, you can add type declarations, which usually result in (much!) faster code and robustness.
If you use webpack's hot reloading properly with something like React, then you get to keep your state - it's only the functions that get swapped out. So it's actually exactly what you describe, and it's brilliant - so much more productive. This isn't even all that new (in web dev terms) - I had this working probably four or five years ago now on a project.
I do procedural music in JS/web audio, and my projects are set up so that changes to the logic and instruments all happen live, while the music continues to play.
How is that different from what you're describing? What specifically can't webpack/HMR do?
I first started out using Tone.js (and recommend it!), but later wound up rolling my own engine and so forth. So I'm just using WebAudio directly (or via libraries I wrote).
It’s relatively simple to have live reloading of individual JavaScript modules in Webpack. If you change the text on a React button component, that module will be recompiled and its new version injected into your browser and re-rendered. The text on the button in your browser will change, but other state will not change (e.g. something in your Redux store).
I’m not an expert, but I think the way it works is that Webpack provides a way for JS modules to register callbacks for what should happen when Webpack detects changes in them and recompiles them. React then provides such a callback implementation for component modules that causes the individual component to re-render. Webpack’s development server also provides a way to inject new code into your app running in a browser.
Things get a little more complicated if you want to hot reload things that deal intimately with state, like Redux reducers or middleware. AFAIK people usually just have the browser do a full page reload when changes are detected in those modules. I think Webpack will actually automatically trigger a full page reload if it detects a change in a module which does not explicitly declare how hot module reloading should be handled.
I only mention React and Redux because it’s the only major stack I’m at all familiar with; I don’t know if other stacks provide similar functionality.
> You won't get what true "liveness" is until you work in Lisp or Smalltalk. The ability to change a function in a running program, without restarting it.
Erlang provides this as well, as do many dynamic languages. However, aside from certain Lisps and Smalltalk that are image based, and a few others, liveness and source persistence are typically traded off for each other. I can make a live change to a Ruby system if it is set up to provide a REPL, but unlike a live Smalltalk change I won't then have the source code for the changed but available the same way it is for the rest of the system. As a result, in many languages live coding features are mostly a tool for experimentation (usually in nonproduction environment!) on code that will eventually be incorporated into traditional source tree for a from-scratch build.
- IBM's visual age for java provided most of this for Java too. (yes, it was modeled to the smalltalk env with the same name)
- Zope (python app server) had a feature where you could debug a web application (in production) in a private session, so all code modifications you did in your session were private until you committed the code.
"Hot code replacement" is a Java VM feature. What makes JRebel useful is support for live reconfiguration of a gazillion Java frameworks (e.g. Hibernate, CDI, Spring etc) so you don't have to restart your server after changing some configuration annotations. It's expensive though and slows down startup so it's a tradeoff.
Arguably Skaffold and other container tools are approaching Webpack in its nonstop build-edit-rebuild workflow. But it's still not part of the code's build process. I'd like to see something like Webpack for native code.
The hypothetical build system can, whenever files change, run the build again (in a container), execute tests (complaining when you break one), or let you keep the debugger open while you're editing (best attempt made to fast forward).
This is probably better suited for modern languages with proper modules and incremental builds, like Rust, C++20, Java9.
I'm not a web dev but used webpack some years ago. Is the issue not that webpack works fine once you finally get it working, and the complaints are about all the issues before it does?
Yes it is, but this article highlights what an achievement it is that webpack is possible at all. I think Bracha would gladly struggle through some config if that was all that stood between him and his holy grail of liveness.
Plus webpack got a lot better even in that regard, and there's alternatives like Parcel pushing the curve. Web devs sometimes don't realize how good they have it :-)
Perhaps, but you’d get similarly unsatisfactory reviews from any technology before you have learned how to use it. Criticism of how difficult it is to learn a technology is valid, but it’s not a valid criticism to say that a technology is not working well before you have learned how to use it.
The biggest problem I see with live systems is this:
The longer you run without a restart, the more dependent you become on the current state. And the more dependent you become, the more likely it is that restarts will be catastrophic due to lost implicit state.
There was (is?) a live code editing capable browser which updates the source code. My failing memory seems to remember creating a project and mounting directories. Chrome? Great idea, but IIRC, also very brittle. And because it had it's own notions of "project", there was some impedance mismatch with the IDE.
Not sure I understand the concrete suggestion here. When I develop I have "live" edits. (JS reloads, C# edit-and-continue, jvm hot reloading etc). But that's stile prone to being out of date, which is why there is a server that builds everything from scratch ensuring that we can reproduce it (as the local developers' edit loop sells those guarantees for speed).
Obviously even a compiler on a server can be caching and clever and not rebuild everything (if you use a source package manager like cargo then you may run into this, but if you have a binary package manager like nuget then you don't - each compilation unit is either required to build or it isn't, and external dependencies are always just fetched).
Gilad Bracha is one of the Smalltalk luminaries (his dialect is called Newspeak) and so he's really alluding to the ST way of doing things, where textual code is instantly compiled to machine-code or JIT-ed ... he's basically against the idea of a compiler as a separate binary that spits out an executable.
I believe that's why he goes on about 'live-ness' which is a very smalltalk concept of a "live-image" of the running program. I doubt what he means is directly translatable to the Javascript world, although perhaps a running browser with JS in it can considered to be the live-image (like, say, the Clojurescript/React/Figwheel way of working).
But as you note, in the JS-dev world, very often you do need to reboot and start again (say if an external resource like a CSS has changed).
I believe many posts here miss the core point. The article is talking about _liveness_, i.e. modifying the program while it is running. One example of this would be Squeak[1]. Another perhaps more relatable one is modifying your HTML5 app from the browser console.
In Smalltalk, does anyone actually modify the production application live? I would think you'd want to modify the live application in devel, and then copy it over.
At this point, you can either copy over the difference or just replace the whole production application. I'm not sure which would be faster.
I don't think liveness is important for a production system. I prefer production to evolve in discrete chunks. Liveness makes sense for development.
I suppose one other benefit of a live system is that you could deploy an update without without restarting the application. But at some level, you would be restarting part of the application, and you are just shifting the update logic from the networking layer to the function call layer or object layer or whatever minimal layer of swappable component you can deploy.
I barely touched Smalltalk, but I think people value liveness as a feature for the user, not the developer. This is basically ultimate customization: you can change the source code of your local copy.
That sounds insane -- how do versions updates work then? One of the best parts of only allowing customization at well-defined points is that you can upgrade software and it is likely to keep working.
Or is the Smalltalk idea that you never update your software?
There are other ways to get liveness, though. You could make it such that multiple instances of the program can run and make, e.g., sure that new logins go to the new one. Once the last login has disappeared from the old program it can be shut down.
As many comments note, the proposal of this post seems a disaster regarding reliablity/predictability.
It's most useful in design. Honestly it's not that useful otherwise and just kills attention span in my experience. Basically we went from doing design WYSIWYG-style to completely in markup languages and CSS. So hot reload bridges the gap.
Yes, it seems most of the posters are mostly familiar with the JS build … situation, where the last addendum of the post regarding multiple languages would apply anyway (as you're often building JS, HTML and CSS in one fell swoop).
Modfiying web apps from the browser seems to be a rare case, interestingly. I think there were a forays[1] made in that direction, but the need for external tools to shoe-horn a half-shod module system onto JS was the final straw for that. Never mind the convenience of some nigh-essential language features (SCSS, ES6).
This is what Bazel, Pants, etc (and I'm sure a bunch of other build tools) do for you. You define a dependency graph, then per commit you can see what targets have been modified and then you can run commands on only targets dependent on the modified ones.
I'm not sure why this blog post is written like these things don't exist.
EDIT: on a re read, I'm a bit off the mark. The author seems to want the compiler or interpreter that reads the code to automatically process the dependency graph of what changed (at the finest grain possible) and take appropriate action.
The company I work at has tools for automatically updating our dependency graph relationships, and then commits/diffs execute commands against the dependencies of modified targets as part of the code review and CD process. This is pretty close to what the author is suggesting.
I still think this blog post is written a bit too dramatically.
> This is what Bazel, Pants, etc (and I'm sure a bunch of other build tools) do for you. You define a dependency graph, then per commit you can see what targets have been modified and then you can run commands on only targets dependent on the modified ones.
This is way less live than the author hints at. Let's take Emacs as an example -- it can be extended using Emacs Lisp. If I write such an extension in Emacs Lisp, and I find that one of the functions isn't right, I go to the function and hit Ctrl-Meta-x and then the function is redefined in the running Emacs, and so I can try again to see if it works now.
Or take the Fish shell as an example. It provides a method to define a function that is automatically saved. So you write a shell function "foo" and you try it out (in your interactive shell) and you see it's not right. You go "funcedit foo" which pops up an editor with the function in it. You make your change and save and exit the editor. You run the function again to see if it now does what you wanted.
A similar experience can be had, I guess, using a Java IDE when working on a web application, if your stack supports hot reload (with JRebel?). You run the application in the debugger, you find it's incorrect, you make a change to the affected method, you save and the IDE hot-reloads the new method into the existing web application and you just try again.
But for all of the above examples, it is still the case that there are two processes -- one redefines things while developing, and the other process kicks in when you turn off your computer and then turn it on again.
I think in Smalltalk, you make code changes using something like the "hot reload" thing, but the new code is automatically saved to "the image". And when you want to run the system, you open "the image".
Another point that seems related is the difficulty of call/cc semantics when dealing with changes in state that are outside the semantics of the virtual machine. It seems to me that there is no easy way to avoid cases like described in the article without forcing explicit accounting of a massive amount of implicit state. Depending on your use case the tradeoff might not be worth it.
On the other hand, I would argue that the idea of a build is an entirely valid and useful construct, it merely represents a point in state space against which test cases (and production) must run. It is impossible to get away from that state. Some tools can make managing it easier, and some make it virtually impossible to manage. Imagine that we discovered a magical halting oracle and that we could compile everything instantaneously, we would still have to figure out what combination of states were valid, and we would call that the 'build'.
I was just thinking that a running application is a little kernel of Code (the stuff that gets checked into source control) and big wrapper of State (what the user is currently doing with it).
The build system view is that the Code is sacrosanct, and what we need to focus on is checking the right stuff into source control and trying to ensure the latest commit is always correct and self-consistent. We should always be able to throw away all the state and rebuild everything from scratch.
The live coding view is that the user is more important than the Code, so we should focus on letting them get stuff done as effectively as possible. And programmers are users too! Therefore we should be able to modify the code without losing any of the user's state.
Both views are correct and what's actually needed is a good balance between the two.
I have two main issues here 1) liveness is great, but you run into fundamental problems when you upgrade a data structure that’s actually in use in memory. This problem is seen during deployment in a compile-time typed language and in production in a runtime typed language.
Also, the more we incrementally patch a live environment the harder it becomes to specify what, exactly, is running in production.
What? Sometimes live or pseudo-live is helpful when programming or debugging, and therefore the whole concept of building software from scratch is invalid?
I do not really see the point of this article. If you want modular software you need to somehow declare dependencies to existing (maybe open source) software components. If you only want to do this via import statements then you would have to use some long URLs pointing to the exact version. You would have to include some GIT commit hash in case the component is hosted on GIT. That doesn't look like a practical approach to me.
If you don't need modularity then as others point out Smalltalk solved this long time ago.
Also as others pointed out, gradle, bazel etc solve most of the issues mentioned (incremental builds, distributed (!) caching of build resources).
As others have noted, the title is confusing; this is really talking about live code reloading. "The build" => offline compilation in general, "is always broken" => is not as good as live reloading.
I've used live reloading in HyperCard, where your application (the "stack") is always running and you can interactively edit the code for each UI element. I think this can work really well, but only under certain constraints:
- You have a very clean separation between code and data (in HyperCard, the data is the set of cards and backgrounds, and the contents of all the fields; the code is the event handlers attached to each object).
- The data format is stable.
- There are clear checkpoints where your data is stable and no code is running.
Those are sometimes the case in some applications. Arguably, all of them are nice properties and therefore good targets to aim for.
But there are plenty of normal scenarios that don't meet those conditions:
- You have an expensive long-running task. Trying to change the code half-way through is a fool's errand. You need to re-run it from the start, and/or find a way to split it up into smaller steps. Unit tests and a good incremental build system are your friends here.
- You're working on the core data structures. Again, trying to update the code while all the data is still in memory is a bad idea. Just use a good build system and try to make the compilation and startup time as fast as possible.
- You're changing the navigation system, so the user's current position in the app won't make sense any more. You'll need to reset back to the front page (or whatever).
For that last one, "apply changes" in C# or Android Studio will generally do the right thing, even though those are mostly traditional build systems.
There isn't really a hard distinction between a build system and live coding, it's a spectrum. I'd argue further that a build system (in the traditional "make" fashion) is more fundamental, because you can achieve anything with a build system (even if it's tedious and inefficient) whereas some tasks are just intractable with live coding. A fast, reliable and correct build system (like Bazel, as several people have mentioned already) is the best foundation for everything else.
Is rebuilding everything from scratch on every build actually that common? If use use docker’s —cache-from flag on build, then assuming you’ve already pushed an image if you don’t make any changes on the part of the code that image is for you’re not going to actually rebuild that. That part of your build is just docker pull, build using cache, no changes so no work.
I'd say for compiled languages it's probably the norm. (i.e. where builds take one huge source repository and produce one set of compiled binaries e.g. a desktop app).
Depending on how clever the build system is, I have been burned by "build hygiene" in the past. Some would go so far as even nuking the source repository and cloning it again rather than updating or running "git clean" etc, to be absolutely sure that no a single byte was left from a previous build (Git is pretty good at this, but other version control systems not so much).
Make is vulnerable to weird errors, as are newer systems like Gradle. Better build systems work hard to be 100% correct. Bazel is the best example I've seen.
I'd say working with an extremely reliable build system is just as eye-opening as working with a good live coding system. If you never have to do a clean build, and the incremental build is fast, that's most of the benefits of live coding right there.
Incremental where you need to stop and restart running is still much slower than hot-edits (as in editing a dynamic/script language file) or hot-reloading statically compiled as C#). So clean build, incremental build+restart, incremental build while running I think is the 3 levels. I wonder if what the article is on about wrt. smalltalk is the last one.
You could maybe distinguish between "incremental build while running" and "no build, just interpret the code directly". But I don't think there's a major difference between those in practice, it's all just a question of how quickly code edits are picked up.
"what kind of debugger does your build tool provide?"
That's what drives me mad about all these configuration heavy (declarative?) systems. Just give me a debugger and an imperative language and I'll step through it myself when there's a problem. It's what is happening anyway so it's a really leaky abstraction.
The Eclipse incremental compiler and the ability to swap method bodies during runtime via debugger connection gives a taste of this for the JVM. If only class redefinitions were supported...
Unison (https://www.unisonweb.org/) is a new programming language designed around a really neat idea that removes the necessity of builds. Unison’s core idea is that code is immutable and identified by its content. A function name can be changed with absolutely no recompilation nor risk to break another piece of code.
Kids today are so spoiled. :P I remember back in my Ericsson days when an incremental build would take 40 minutes, and then another 20 or so to load the resulting 100 MB monolithic executable onto hardware and boot it up. That kind of turnaround time teaches you to think through your code thoroughly, and use the type system to catch bugs early.
This is one area where Electron really shines. For example, VS Code is a reasonably large project, yet one can make a modification and play with it within a couple seconds (~200ms to recompile the changes, a second or two to reload the window). I’d be curious if anyone here knows how InteliJ or Eclipse compares?
gcc can generate make dependencies since forever ago. That with ccache and distcc enables an environment where most of the time, compiling just a file or two plus linking needs to be done. For C at least, this problem has been solved for a while.
Indeed, the building blocks for fast iteration are there, but as always in the 40-years-old ecosystem of C, no coherent solution has emerged and dominated the landscape.
I'm used to using a Continuous Integration (CI) system which doesn't allow code to be merged unless it builds and tests pass. This does not allow for super fast merging as builds take time and testing takes time. But it prevents builds from breaking.
Not exactly what the main focus of the article. But when the article talks about "the build is broken" then using a CI system which prevents that is good. It doesn't prevent an individual developer from breaking their local build of course.
OP should take a look at bazel and reevaluate his opinions. Things like executing only tests when necessary, caching/remote executing everything and stellar cross language support make it easier than ever to rebuild the world every time.
OP worked at Google as one of the creators of Dart so I assume he had a chance to encounter Bazel. Reading the post I got the feeling that these takes are partly informed by his encounters with die-hard Build System Believers.
Here's a question for die-hard live coding believers: what gets checked into source control?
I enjoy live coding, but the idea of checking in an "image" of the running system sounds horrible. You want to clearly distinguish between the key stuff and all the incidental state. The key stuff is what gets checked in, and that's your build system right there.
(I don't ask just for the sake of arguing, I'm interested in the answer! And I don't see it addressed anywhere in the article.)
No joke intended. From reading the article, where cmake and scons are criticized, my impression was that many of OPs concerns could be addressed by using something more fundamentally sound like bazel.
The problem is guaranteeing correctness. Correct cache invalidation is Hard(TM). Therefore, the CI system builds from scratch in order to guarantee a clean, correct and reproducible output from a given snapshot of the source.
As for 'live programming' against a running image, this write-up starts with the implicit assumption that this is always a good thing. While it can be useful on occasion, the reason for restarting the application after changing its source code is the same reason we favour functional, immutable styles: mutable state is a pain and it's best to push it out of the thing you're working with if at all possible. Modifying the running image risks ending up with internal states which no single snapshot of the source could ever have yielded.