Inspector – A drop-anywhere C++ REPL

Injecting a REPL into a given section of code is my favorite means of debugging and interactively developing. I&#x27;ve gotten into the habit of building up a class interactively within Emacs and re-evaluating files after they have been changed.<p>It feels a bit like test driven development, but much more concrete. When I don&#x27;t really know what I want to build, or what is possible, it&#x27;s a fun way to spike out some functionality.<p>Then after you see what sort of path could exist from your interactive session you can use the code as a scaffold and re-implement the functionality by writing a test and implementing the code to satisfy it.

This comes at a good time as it&#x27;s something I&#x27;ve been looking for. We have a physics engine and we want to allow users to write custom c++ functions that can be linked in at run-time. We&#x27;d like to allow our users to swap in their own custom integration or timestep methods for example.<p>As an aside, do you know if it is possible to use this to JIT C++ for CUDA kernels?

Do people create stuff like this because they don&#x27;t have access to good interactive debuggers? Visual Studio user here.

Hmm -- I wonder why they chose to not use Jupyter as an REPL &quot;backend&quot; (Jupyter calls them &quot;kernels&quot;).

How is this better than just attaching GDB?

Very interesting. Does it require a C++17 compiler? Also is there any way to simply use a different way of interacting with the REPL? For instance over sockets rather than stdio.