You may notice that within the first 15 seconds of this YouTube video (from 1:01:01 to 1:01:16), Markus Persson (aka "Notch", creator of Minecraft) has somehow managed to save/update an application and attach a debugger to it while it was already under the process of being debugged, supposedly all with a simple keyboard shortcut. The previously coded application somehow magically became the newly edited one, and seemingly without relaunching it or spawning a new process... It's possible that this is just some form of locally remote debugging, but something about it just doesn't seem quite right.
I've spent several days Googling and asking around on how he was able to do this, yet to no avail. I've found no such option under Eclipse preferences, and whenever I try to save & debug an already running application, it simply launches a separate instance of the newly updated application, side-by-side with the older, outdated one.
Am I missing something? How was this possible?
How was he able to utilize such an astounding, powerful debugging feature?
Thanks in advance!
Okay, so this appears to be a standard feature specific to Eclipse.
Coming from a background in NetBeans and Visual Studio, I'm astounded that this doesn't seem to exist elsewhere (or at least in NetBeans!)...
This is a built-in feature of Eclipse. If you edit a method while the program is running in debug mode, it will compile the new method, and replace the old method with the new version. If some thread was already running that method, it will jump back to the beginning (AFAIK; this might only happen when the program is paused).
You don't need to re-launch the program or set any special preferences. Just edit and save, and the magic will happen.
Eclipse can't always figure out how to merge your changes into the running program - usually if you changed anything outside a method body (including the method's parameters or return type). In this case, you will get a warning dialog, with the option to stop the program, restart the program or ignore the changes.