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Comment by spacemanaki | Hacker News Reader

Forgive my ignorance of iOS, but do the current Objective-C based tools deliver "An interactive shell [...] for introspection, live coding and debugging" ? If RubyMotion can actually deliver a real first-class REPL that works, that would be a pretty huge deal. Lack of a REPL is the biggest reason why I dislike mobile (Android) development.

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No, it doesn't, and it is the thing that I miss the most going from Ruby to Obj-C. All of the other benefits of ruby over obj-c are great, but it's the interactive shell that is the highlight of RubyMotion to me.

Yes, it's called GDB or LLDB, depending on your compiler. Not live coding though, but I don't know if that's a big deal.

Yes, it's a big deal. Being able to live code completely changes (and dare I say, improves) one's ability to construct rather complicated structures that work because the small building blocks are live-tested. It's fantastic.

And now I'm left wondering how Apple ships anything without a REPL.

It's not a big deal*

* former smalltalker

What are you looking for with an Android REPL? Asking because this is something I might be interested in building. Feel free to take the conversation to email (@gmail) or twitter (@jbrechtel) if you'd rather limit the off-topic discussion.

It would have to be very close to as powerful as deploying code in an APK, in other words few limitations on what kind of code can be run via the REPL. There are two big limitations with Android here, as far as I understand it: there's a fair amount that you're not allowed to do dynamically (like create new Activities), and Dalvik has limitations with dynamic class generation. To be honest I haven't experimented with it much, but I was disappointed that the Clojure and Ruby REPLs didn't quite deliver what I was hoping they would (no fault of the project authors)

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