Notes
2025/07/21

RC week 9: live reload with replay semantics

I've spent the past week at the Recurse Center writing a short paper about live reload with replay semantics which I'm hoping to submit to the 11th Workshop on Live Programming. Here's the abstract:

We present a solution for live reloading that avoids stale state through replay semantics: no matter when code is reloaded, the live system state can always be reproduced by replaying the session from the start using only the current code version. Our approach caches side effects while replaying pure computation, ensuring the source code remains the single source of truth. We formalize replay semantics and demonstrate how to implement live reloading with these guarantees in languages that separate pure computation from effects.

Here's the paper.