miniblog.

I would have thought that invoking a C compiler would be a solved problem. Looking at Rust's cc crate there's a remarkable long tail of corner cases to fix. Exotic CPUs, microarchitectures, compiler differences, operating system differences, etc.

One remarkable aspect of the JS packaging ecosystem is that people package individual functions. For example, lodash.sortby: https://www.npmjs.com/package/lodash.sortby It shows how lightweight the packaging process is. I've not seen this happen in other ecosystems.

Smalltalk has a remarkable method named #become: that allows you to modify all pointers to a given object to point to a different object! https://gbracha.blogspot.com/2009/07/miracle-of-become.html This goes even further than updating instances when a class changes, it's changing instance references.