We’ve been working with Stefan Reinalter and the team at Molecular Matters to make the industry-leading Live++ binary patching tool work seamles

Hot-Reloading C++ with Live++ and JetBrains Rider

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2024-09-25 09:00:05

We’ve been working with Stefan Reinalter and the team at Molecular Matters to make the industry-leading Live++ binary patching tool work seamlessly with C++ projects in JetBrains Rider!

This is a great productivity boost for both Unreal Engine developers and those working on custom C++ engines. Live++ support works with all C and C++ projects in Rider and reduces iteration time by reloading changes to your code while the application is running, even when paused at a breakpoint.

While Live++ works with any editor, we’ve been working on Rider integration to improve your experience of working with Live++ and Rider. This doesn’t introduce any new UI features, but it does make the workflow a lot smoother. For example, Live++ will navigate to compile errors in Rider, automatically reattach the debugger when your application hot-restarts, and will hot-deoptimize the current file when using the Live++ hotkey.

For those not familiar with Live++, it’s a great technology for reducing iteration time while building, running, and debugging your C and C++ applications. Conceptually, it’s very similar to Edit and Continue, or to the Hot Reload and Live Coding features of Unreal Engine, although it is more advanced and feature-rich. There are three main features we’ll look at today – Hot-Reload, Hot-Restart, and Hot-Deoptimize.