From: itsme213 <itsme213@...>
Date: 2005-01-28T00:00:56+09:00
Subject: Image-based Ruby - feasibility

Would an image-based environment for Ruby be feasible? Useful?

A recent post on Rails (iirc) mentioned something about removing classes.
How about an editing environment which keeps Ruby running, 'require'ing your
project files as you need so you can poke around in your running program.
Write and run tests and change code. Uncaught exceptions leave you in the
debugger with your progran running. Then when you edit a file, the
environment can re-load your file, except it first does a #const_remove on
all constants which were introduced in that file the previous time around
(hence clearing classes, modules, etc.). It might also have to re-load some
other files as a result (e.g. another file might have re-opened a class).
Perhaps it could even locate and reset trailing references to now-replaced
objects (at least classes and modules).

This is just for smoother development cycles. Your program is still defined
by your source files and 'requires', not an automatic Smalltalk-like
snapshot image.

Would the assumptions behind something like this still support useful (not
necessarily all) Ruby development? Does Ruby have enough hooks into things
like constant definitions and class/module extensions to make this feasible?