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Just to be clear Julia is "AOT-JIT", that means that the methods are compiled when used the first time. With Revise.jl (a package for interactive development) y

Just to be clear Julia is "AOT-JIT", that means that the methods are compiled when used the first time. With Revise.jl (a package for interactive development) you can make a fully interactive Julia process, rewriting things on the fly, while benefiting from fast code

freemint 5y ago
Running Revise in production sounds unwise (sorry for the pun). Also you can very much not redefine functions on the fly due to world age (assuming the caller doesn't pay for invoke-latest).
- ChrisRackauckas 5y ago
  You're not doing interactive development on production. Production is the case where you just build a system image and deploy it without compile times. This is done all of the time, for example with Pumas.
  - freemint 5y ago
    In certain common lisp deployment you might do that. There are legends from Common Lisp users where this is very much done. > When one of the customer support people came to me with a report of a bug in the editor, I would load the code into the Lisp interpreter and log into the user's account. If I was able to reproduce the bug I'd get an actual break loop, telling me exactly what was going wrong. Often I could fix the code and release a fix right away. And when I say right away, I mean while the user was still on the phone. > Such fast turnaround on bug fixes put us into an impossibly tempting position. If we could catch and fix a bug while the user was still on the phone, it was very tempting for us to give the user the impression that they were imagining it. And so we sometimes (to their delight) had the customer support people tell the user to just try logging in again and see if they still had the problem. And of course when the user logged back in they'd get the newly released version of the software with the bug fixed, and everything would work fine. I realize this was a bit sneaky of us, but it was also a lot of fun. Taken from https://sep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt?t=1637873414& https://sep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt?t=163... I know that this is not possible in Julia like that. But just because it's not possible in Julia doesn't mean what they did was somehow wrong when it worked well for them.
    - ChrisRackauckas 5y ago
      Call me a cynic but I would hope almost no devs had the power to live update the production codebase. That sounds crazy to me. To me, that kind of thing should only be done with (approved/verified) versions which are cut and tested before deployment, and deployment should act like an unchangeable immutable compiled binary until the next binary is ready. Not only is this legally required in many scientific cases, but also production should have a lot more care. This kind of thing sounds fine for a dev server though, in which case Revise+RuntimeGeneratedFunctions will get it done in the cases I've seen.
      - pm90 5y ago
        I understand where you’re coming from, it’s the production robustness paradigm of someone who has worked with such systems and knows what kind of controls are required to release code. eg live editing like that would almost certainly go against SOC2 controls. However, I’m also tempted very much by a system that allows for fixing things so quickly, because it provides for a delightful customer experience. Most customers don’t report most issues, only when something is persistently wrong or is something they can’t get around. So being able to quickly fix it this way seems genuinely amazing. If I were to take this idea further… maybe some sort of customer isolated canary deploy/ feature flag might be the way to express this customer experience in todays world. The problem is always that you might break other things with your fix. Maybe a battery of testing before canary deploys can raise confidence about the validity of the fix.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      most famous one being NASA JPL remote patch
  - lukego 5y ago
    This is a binary view of development-verses-production. I appreciate languages that treat this as a continuum and let me make my own trade-offs. Common Lisp, Smalltalk, and Erlang all treat the process as running indefinitely. This gives those languages a certain something special. I was hoping to find the same thing in Julia. It's not there. It seems like a significant missed opportunity to me. These dismissive comments make it sound like you guys might not know what you are missing.
    - ChrisRackauckas 5y ago
      We legally cannot do things like say live code change the production system underlying the analysis of ongoing clinical trials without going through the whole software development lifecycle required by the FDA (I.e. the Pumas example again), so even if it did exist all a lot of the production systems we're running legally couldn't use it. But also, you can do it with Revise+RuntimeGeneratedFunctions, obviously that solves the mentioned world age issue so I don't see what the fuss is all about? I don't see how offering a solution is dismissive?
      - medo-bear 5y ago
        but you can adhere to legal requirements and go through all the code and test reviews and still have live update capability. i don't see why they are exclusive. moreover, there are scenarios where taking the system off-line for an update would cause a critical failure
        ChrisRackauckas 5y ago
        Okay, so then use RuntimeGeneratedFunctions+Revise. Done. Julia can do it, but having a setup so that people can do instant review of changes on the live production system is still a little bizarre and I wouldn't do it even though we could.
        medo-bear 5y ago
        i was just explaining luke's point. i think he was hoping that julia would do more to enable interactive development a la common lisp/smalltalk

freemint 5y ago

Running Revise in production sounds unwise (sorry for the pun). Also you can very much not redefine functions on the fly due to world age (assuming the caller doesn't pay for invoke-latest).

ChrisRackauckas 5y ago
You're not doing interactive development on production. Production is the case where you just build a system image and deploy it without compile times. This is done all of the time, for example with Pumas.
- freemint 5y ago
  In certain common lisp deployment you might do that. There are legends from Common Lisp users where this is very much done. > When one of the customer support people came to me with a report of a bug in the editor, I would load the code into the Lisp interpreter and log into the user's account. If I was able to reproduce the bug I'd get an actual break loop, telling me exactly what was going wrong. Often I could fix the code and release a fix right away. And when I say right away, I mean while the user was still on the phone. > Such fast turnaround on bug fixes put us into an impossibly tempting position. If we could catch and fix a bug while the user was still on the phone, it was very tempting for us to give the user the impression that they were imagining it. And so we sometimes (to their delight) had the customer support people tell the user to just try logging in again and see if they still had the problem. And of course when the user logged back in they'd get the newly released version of the software with the bug fixed, and everything would work fine. I realize this was a bit sneaky of us, but it was also a lot of fun. Taken from https://sep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt?t=1637873414& https://sep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt?t=163... I know that this is not possible in Julia like that. But just because it's not possible in Julia doesn't mean what they did was somehow wrong when it worked well for them.
  - ChrisRackauckas 5y ago
    Call me a cynic but I would hope almost no devs had the power to live update the production codebase. That sounds crazy to me. To me, that kind of thing should only be done with (approved/verified) versions which are cut and tested before deployment, and deployment should act like an unchangeable immutable compiled binary until the next binary is ready. Not only is this legally required in many scientific cases, but also production should have a lot more care. This kind of thing sounds fine for a dev server though, in which case Revise+RuntimeGeneratedFunctions will get it done in the cases I've seen.
    - pm90 5y ago
      I understand where you’re coming from, it’s the production robustness paradigm of someone who has worked with such systems and knows what kind of controls are required to release code. eg live editing like that would almost certainly go against SOC2 controls. However, I’m also tempted very much by a system that allows for fixing things so quickly, because it provides for a delightful customer experience. Most customers don’t report most issues, only when something is persistently wrong or is something they can’t get around. So being able to quickly fix it this way seems genuinely amazing. If I were to take this idea further… maybe some sort of customer isolated canary deploy/ feature flag might be the way to express this customer experience in todays world. The problem is always that you might break other things with your fix. Maybe a battery of testing before canary deploys can raise confidence about the validity of the fix.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    most famous one being NASA JPL remote patch
- lukego 5y ago
  This is a binary view of development-verses-production. I appreciate languages that treat this as a continuum and let me make my own trade-offs. Common Lisp, Smalltalk, and Erlang all treat the process as running indefinitely. This gives those languages a certain something special. I was hoping to find the same thing in Julia. It's not there. It seems like a significant missed opportunity to me. These dismissive comments make it sound like you guys might not know what you are missing.
  - ChrisRackauckas 5y ago
    We legally cannot do things like say live code change the production system underlying the analysis of ongoing clinical trials without going through the whole software development lifecycle required by the FDA (I.e. the Pumas example again), so even if it did exist all a lot of the production systems we're running legally couldn't use it. But also, you can do it with Revise+RuntimeGeneratedFunctions, obviously that solves the mentioned world age issue so I don't see what the fuss is all about? I don't see how offering a solution is dismissive?
    - medo-bear 5y ago
      but you can adhere to legal requirements and go through all the code and test reviews and still have live update capability. i don't see why they are exclusive. moreover, there are scenarios where taking the system off-line for an update would cause a critical failure
      - ChrisRackauckas 5y ago
        Okay, so then use RuntimeGeneratedFunctions+Revise. Done. Julia can do it, but having a setup so that people can do instant review of changes on the live production system is still a little bizarre and I wouldn't do it even though we could.
        medo-bear 5y ago
        i was just explaining luke's point. i think he was hoping that julia would do more to enable interactive development a la common lisp/smalltalk