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Comment by pulse7 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe - one day - somebody will make the image based virtual machine for Java... VisualAge for Java was an attempt in that direction, but the image part was abandoned later in Eclipse...

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I think that the magic ingredient is not the image itself. Imagine that you have the language where every method/function is in its own file, and most of them are very short (two, three lines). Then the text editing functionality of the IDE starts to be really unimportant - something on the level of Notepad is good enough. It makes the compilation super fast; the IDE needs to invest in exploring relations between these small code fragments (that have no defined order), their organization, code changes need to be not just text file editing (Smalltalk pioneered refactorings). This is one thing that makes Smalltalk so interesting (and what the mainstream does not get).

iirc Bill Opdyke's refactorings were for C++

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7274256

I like the idea of a live image, and have watched some Smalltalkers being amazingly productive, but I hope the next iteration of image-based IDEs think about some advances such as multi-images, round trips to text, and better scripting around the creation, destruction, and interaction of multiple VMs. Having checkpoints would be a nice touch. Image deltas and stare copying would be nice.

The Smalltalk VCSes do all that, AFAIK, even as far back as Envy

Take a look at TruffleSqueak on the Graal VM.

Actually that is kind of the idea behind Eclipse's workspace concept.

It wasn't abandoned, rather rebuilt on top of a virtual file system.

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