REPL

[borkdude]

We need to support a REPL with clavascript and the concept of a development mode.
During development, namespaces need to be fully mutable, so vars can be redefined.
We could focus on a console REPL first, then add nREPL support.

[lilactown]

Thinking while typing... can we guarantee a clava REPL we design will work in every environment? Said another way: evaluating code seems inherently coupled with the JS runtime & build tools in use for a given project. Perhaps we should start with a few specific targets... Vite REPL, node.js REPL, deno or bun REPL?

I think that continuing to explore how we could make modules mutable is worthwhile, as I'm not sure anyone has gone deep on that solution in practice. As a second option, we could explore more intimately coupled solutions to the specific environments that we are targeting.

For instance, in the browser using a build tool like Vite, we could potentially use their hot module reloading API. Most build tools have their own HMR API, so building a plugin for Vite probably won't work for webpack or others.

Curious what you think @borkdude @corasaurus-hex

[borkdude]

Honestly, for front-end things like Vite etc. their hot-reloading tooling probably works good enough to not have a REPL. I have to admit that I haven't used a REPL in years for front-end ClojureScript because it was so cumbersome to work with in my experience.

[stevemolitor]

I see I can run squint repl - awesome! Can I run a nrepl and jack via Cider?

Maybe not so useful for frontend work, but could be super-helpful for node.js scripts.

[borkdude]

nREPL not yet. Also this the squint repl is very experimental. But you could try to use it with inf-clojure.

[Ralii]

I personally use REPL quite a lot on frontend. I have emacs functions to inspect app-db, get value from subscriptions, render evaluated component and I use Snitch https://github.com/AbhinavOmprakash/snitch extensively to do interactive frontend development. I understand REPL is not that used in frontend but I really like it is giving me a huge boost in productivity and motivation.

[borkdude]

nREPL for Node.js is now available (immature, but please test it and report issues). I hope to enable this on the front-end also somehow.