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Cling (the underlying just-in-time compiler) supports this. However Cling is more a standalone REPL and has a different execution flow. Here the idea of Inspector is to be executed from within running, compiled programs

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Thanks -- I wasn't aware that something like cling exists.

How does Inspector differentiate itself from embedding cling to an application? It's very interesting to me because I've been trying to get something like an IPython console / IPdb prompt inside Java using Jython for a long time, and I'd very much like to read more about some design decisions in that area.

To access local variables, as you can see in the example, Inspector uses libclang ahead of compile-time to generate code that captures all local variables where the REPL is invoked. In JVM you could probably use introspection to achieve the same at run-time. I also gave a brief presentation about the design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl5RSlW6xAc

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