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

Thanks! This was exactly what I was looking for!
Can you embed the repl into your programs?

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________________________________
From: Kristian Lein-Mathisen <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, 11 August 2026 10:53:21
To: Srayan Jana <[email protected]>
Cc: chicken-users <[email protected]>
Subject: 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]<mailto:[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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