That's really neat.

has anyone already come up with a thing that reloads deps.edn, adding any newly added libraries to the classpath?

Alex's add-lib would probably be pliable to that. If you build it, I would be interested.

FWIW I have done a few experiments with dynamically adding dependencies at runtime for shadow-cljs

the only case where this works reliably is when adding dependencies that don't depend on anything different than what is already loaded

as soon as there are any version conflicts things get icky

eg. lib-a depends on X version 1.0.0 and is loaded. lib-b wants to be added but would cause X version 1.2.0 to be loaded instead of 1.0.0 if constructed normally

since we can't easily unload version 1.0.0 you might now not be able to load properly

unfortunately that scenario is quite common for bigger libs

works well enough for simple libs without deps though

gets even more complicated when accounting for npm deps 😉

I'm guessing pomegranate/alembic and friends also have this issue then

deps resolves version conflicts slightly differently so it is more prone to this

but yes same issue is present everywhere

I see