DCEVM VS alive

Umm.. you can throw an exception, you can return to previous call frame, you can reload modified classes. If you want unlimited code modification, you can use dcevm https://github.com/dcevm/dcevm

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/altering-the-program-s-e...

You may be interested in https://github.com/nobody-famous/alive which brings the power of slime to vscode (Mostly, it's relatively new and missing some features, but getting better all the time)

I’ve recently been enjoying using Alive with vscode(and copilot). Everyone suggests emacs+slime but it always felt like too many things to learn at once. Being able to use my usual ide has made it so much more pleasant. Recommend it to newcomers.

https://github.com/nobody-famous/alive

I was motivated to learn some lisp last year but couldn't find any usable plugins for IntelliJ (and I refuse to learn Emacs). I ended up using VSCode with the Alive extension: https://github.com/nobody-famous/alive

Also perhaps collab with this dev. https://github.com/nobody-famous/alive

I also read up on alternatives, and also tried out the alive VSCode extension. Unfortunately, I could not get it to work on my machine.

My recommendation would be Alive, a Visual Studio Code extension. It still has a few rough edges (for example, one bug I tripped on is that it doesn’t work super great with VSCode’s anonymous tabs, it apparently expects a file on disk), but is still far and away the best free non-emacs CL development environment I’ve used.