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C and C++ Hot-Reload/Live Coding

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Re: C and C++ Hot-Reload/Live Coding

#5

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

Wow—a commercial offering exclusively targeting Windows, C++, and game development, and yet showcased on Hacker News. A rare combination indeed! :P

EDIT: The deep dive[1] on their webpage is absolutely worth a read.

[1]: https://liveplusplus.tech/downloads/THQ_Nordic_Dev_Summit_20...

Re: C and C++ Hot-Reload/Live Coding

#6

Post by mjburgess »

fyi, "hot reload" is a native part of every operating system (consider, even trivially, forking or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_loading).

It's a sign of how bad developer tooling has been that live reload is sold as an add-on feature. DX seems always to see-saw between bill gate's c. 1990 demo of VB, and the compile-time speeds of a N' Wirth.

At a guess, when the internet happened, all DX had to be thrown away and we still arent back to where we were 30+ y ago.

I support being paid for your work, but live reload is a fairly trivial thing to write for yourself -- I spent one day this gone weekend writing a debugger in C which does it.

(consider also, https://github.com/tsoding/musializer which has live rebuild via the nobuild system in nob.c)

Re: C and C++ Hot-Reload/Live Coding

#7

Post by agentultra »

mjburgess wrote: post #6

fyi, "hot reload" is a native part of every operating system (consider, even trivially, forking or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_loading ). It's a sign of how bad developer tooling has been that live reload is sold as an add-on feature. DX seems always to see-saw between bill gate's c. 1990 demo of VB, and the compile-time speeds of a N' Wirth. At a guess, when the internet happened, all DX had to be thrown a…

I was also suspicious but I think this system does have advantages over the OS interfaces for this: incremental compilation and binary patching. If this goes down to the function or block level definitions and is fast that's pretty sweet. The only time I've enjoyed that kind of DX is with Common Lisp/CLOS.

Update: there's a "deep dive" power-point that goes into a bit more detail: https://liveplusplus.tech/downloads/THQ_Nordic_Dev_Summit_20...

Re: C and C++ Hot-Reload/Live Coding

#9

Post by jasonjmcghee »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #5

Wow—a commercial offering exclusively targeting Windows, C++, and game development, and yet showcased on Hacker News. A rare combination indeed! :P EDIT: The deep dive[1] on their webpage is absolutely worth a read. [1]: https://liveplusplus.tech/downloads/THQ_Nordic_Dev_Summit_20...

Fwiw, I would guess, after unity, C++ targeting windows is the dominate approach to game development by a margin. And I see game engines on HN pretty often. Doesn't seem that strange

Re: C and C++ Hot-Reload/Live Coding

#10

Post by Pesthuf »

The World of Warcraft Server emulator TrinityCore has a hot reload system for its Scripting (Boss AI, Spells etc.). AFAIK when it's enabled, those modules are compiled into their own shared library and when you make a change to one of the script .cpp files, it triggers a compilation and then unloads and reloads the shared library (I think the process is more complicated than that so it doesn't crash for scripts that are currently active and different operating systems behaving differently).

Made developing those scripts much, much more comfortable when it was introduce. You no longer needed to manually compile, stop and start the server, wait for all the database stuff to be loaded, switch to the client, log back in, wait and then retry on every single tiny change. To me, it was like magic.

Today, I wonder why they didn't just use a proper scripting language.

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