Friday, January 09, 2015

OS Project with initial support for Ubuntu and Unix

Beside the existing "OS-Windows" support for Windows operating system the "Pharo OS project" now also has new subprojects for "OS-Unix" and "OS-Linux-Ubuntu" with some initial support for these native platforms as well.

You can load it from the config browser in Pharo 4.0.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

But... what is the OS Project? I'm guessing it's a stand-alone smalltalk/pharo running in top of windows/linux/osx. Am I right?

Torsten said...

No, it is just a layer on top of Pharo to easily use functionality of the underlying platform. It is based on NativeBoost (NB) and with NB there is no necessity to implement VirtualMachine plugins to call out to any API or external lib you may want to use from you OS.

So it is not an own Pharo, just a package on top loadable into any Pharo image. Because there are different OS platforms with different host APIs the "OS" project is structured into subprojects for the host platforms like Windows, Unix, ...

For instance I wrapped Win32 Registry access in Windows which usually is not there by default in the usual Pharo image. If you know you work on Windows you can use this package and the utility classes to access the registry easily in your app.