Re: What the best way to support hot reloading in Chicken?

Hi,

I'd say all the hot-swapping functionality you need is the REPL itself.

Many Schemes, like Chicken, allow you to replace values defined at the
top-level. These new definitions will be picked up by anything using them*.
If you organize your code appropriately, you can hot-swap things by
issuing, for example:

    (define (existing-function x) (* x x))

Note that you can get a running REPL on your own compiled programs, it's
not csi specific. See http://api.call-cc.org/6/doc/chicken/repl

Also, this 8 year old video of mine may be of interest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXB3I3S3vJc

Cheers and hope you'll enjoy this form of interactive development!

*: Does not always apply to highly optimized compiled code.
K.

On Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 17:38 Srayan Jana via Chicken-users <
[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello!
> Is it at all possible to do hot reloading/hot swapping in Chicken Scheme?
> Like, being able to edit code while a program is running like you can do
> with SBCL and SLIME? I'm going to guess the answer is no.
>
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