

Should Java have an interpretor - fcq731

Lots of people complaint that java compiling process takes such a long time and make development cycle longer than PHP.<p>Just thinking that Java should have an interpretor for its development to shorter people's development cycle. Maybe that will make it more appearing.
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lukesandberg
The JVM supports a feature called hot swapping (i think thats what it is
called), where classes can be reloaded at run time. Most IDEs take advantage
of this in debug mode. So a lot of the time i just launch my server in debug
mode and edit freely. Occasionally i will have to restart the server, but it
works surprisingly well. In fact you don't necessarily need an IDE to do this.
A lot of servlet containers support this as well, where you can just copy
updated jars to the servlet libs (obviously some simple scripts help a lot
with this). After enough 'hot' deploys the JVM will eventually run out of
perm-gen space, but even with that limitation you still get 10-20 edit-refresh
cycles out of it.

Setting up your tools right can help a lot. Also, optimizing your build
scripts. Ideally these will all work together to make it less painful :)

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fcq731
I recently switch from Java to PHP development. And I totally agree with you
about setting up tools right can save tons of time. But the reality is it is
still painful.

My point here is not whether we need more tools for the hot swapping, but just
have an interpretor for development processes. It will just make the
development much easier.

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read_wharf
<https://duckduckgo.com/?q=java+repl>

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swah
Check how the Play framework handles this.

