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Curious: has anyone yet used Hooks to build a state-preserving live editing tool? Reloads are so awful—I'm still hoping for DisplayScript's glorious ability to update the running program on every editor keypress without losing state. :)

дэн

@dan_abramov

Mar 30, 2019

That was one of the first things I tried :-) Need to get back to it. In general it's much easier to hot reload than classes because wrapping a function is sufficient. A bit harder to detect when to reset (e.g. if order or type changes).

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and

Right: the ability to swap the function body out but keep the same hook state struck me as promising in the spirit of DisplayScript’s state cells. Here’s hoping!

7:01 PM · Mar 30, 2019Twitter for iPhone

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Regarding order/type changes: what if the tool embedded a flow server? Would be enough for types but not order. For that you’d want an incremental AST diff—paging

Yeah, if you can know which node the keypress is going into you can do a much better job much faster than ex post facto diff reconstruction. tbh tho this is still going to be hard because so many keypresses yield inconsistent states, so maybe you want structural editing?

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