NOnonbirithm·Jul 10, 2020
I have managed to program a REPL in Lua for game development. I also added a feature that lets you reload any single Lua module at runtime, thanks to late binding through tables. Nobody seems to standardize on a good way of doing it so I had to roll my own but I've saved countless hours of restart time doing so and had fun programming at times.
There really, really should be a standard protocol for communicating with a REPL in a running program like there is for IDEs in the Language Server Protocol. Maybe that way the concept would become more mainstream if you could just take any REPL client and walk up to a program with a REPL server and interactively explore its state. The closest thing to said protocol is nREPL which is what Clojure uses, but there are a lot of nonstandard extensions to the protocol for edge case features only applica
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ble to Clojure, so almost every client assumes you're using Clojure and it greatly reduces the viability of using it for Lua or other languages. It doesn't have the backing of something like Microsoft either, I guess because this REPL thing lives in its own world with the Clojure userbase.
I opened an issue on Clojure's REPL integration with Emacs for supporting more languages[1]. I wanted to take advantage of the effort spent on Clojure's client side tooling for things like the command prompt and state visualiser but apply them to at least Lua and allow others to add their own support for other languages. It would be a really big effort but I've already seen the value of it by integrating a REPL with projects written in Lua. As you said I can't ever imagine using a dynamic language without one again.
[1] https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider/issues/2848