With the failure of Lisp Machines, Lucid pivoted into doing a Lisp like interactive environment for C++, with compilation at function/method level. There is an old VHS video that some uploaded to YouTube demoing it. Search for Lucid C++.
The last version of Visual C++ (v4) used a database repository as binary representation of C++ code, also offering an interactive experience.
The problem with both environments was that they required powerful hardware that most people weren't wiling to pay for and consequently died.
Microsoft is now having a smarter linker with db support for VSC++ 2017.
Both Apple and Google were discussing at last LLVM conference how to add similar capabilities, IDE friendly, to clang, partially based on the Swift Playgrounds development experience.
I think I vaguely recall learning about database-incorporating C++ compilers recently, and now I actually see them. This is really neat.
I'm definitely looking forward to LLVM getting these capabilities. It'll move C++ development forward by light years, I reckon. (For example, Chrome takes an hour to fully rebuild in CI on what I suspect is fairly modern server hardware.)
The last version of Visual C++ (v4) used a database repository as binary representation of C++ code, also offering an interactive experience.
The problem with both environments was that they required powerful hardware that most people weren't wiling to pay for and consequently died.
Microsoft is now having a smarter linker with db support for VSC++ 2017.
Both Apple and Google were discussing at last LLVM conference how to add similar capabilities, IDE friendly, to clang, partially based on the Swift Playgrounds development experience.