Hacker News Reader

Comment by holografix | Hacker News Reader

I think Go could be fundamentally improved if it somehow offered a REPL.

So you're at step 3?

From the article? Not at all. It doesn't matter if it's easy or difficult, because it only needs to be coded once. And it's not a request to change the language at all, just the tooling.

I don't really understand how a REPL would help with coding Go. I think I use tests to do what I think people use REPLs for, and I don't get why I'd change that to a REPL if I could - having those tests permanent is a good thing.

What would a REPL bring to the party?

A REPL allows you to work in real-time with the system as it's written.

It's nothing like unit testing. It's like running around in the system able to poke-prod things as you go.

Particularly important is that it doesn't mean working in a console. Most REPL-based dev is done in the source code file itself, and you send code from the document to the REPL process. Code is written in a file as usual, and you utilize the REPL to massage the system as you want.

Though it's Clojure-based, you might want to watch this talk: https://vimeo.com/223309989

yeah that would be interesting to try out, thanks for the link :)

I meant that I use tests as a way of poke-prodding things - because Go compiles so fast, and you can run individual tests, it's easy to tool around in test code setting up specific state in code and seeing what happens.

Checkout https://github.com/containous/yaegi . Don't think its very mature though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com