Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Pharo Headless - Beta

An early preview - but you can already get real headless vm and image from zero-conf and play with it. This is work from the Pharo Consortium Team from the last couple of months.

Some interesting features:

  • Image handles creation of main world - so the Pharo world instantiation and handling is even more shifted to the image side - allows to play with new ideas on world and window creation This will provide more backends: the regular VM support (compatibility with non-headless VMs), and OSWindow with two additional backends: SDL and GTK3+ (implemented using UFFI calls)
  • Handling of events on the image side - which will hopefull allow for better event handling as we can process events directly within the image and not the VM
  • VMMaker code migrated to Tonel and update on VMMaker to execute in Pharo 7 and 8 - this allows for easier VM building of the Pharo virtual machine (which is based on OpenSmalltalk VM)
  • Removing GPL code from the VM repository - to be more license clean
And the one I like most: the virtual machine is now a dynamic library. Which is the first but an important step towards embedding Pharo into other applications!

If you want to try it out check the headless branch within the OpenSmalltalk VM repository:

https://github.com/pharo-project/opensmalltalk-vm


There is also a Continuous integration (CI) job available.

Read the full announcement.

Pharo bindings to the LLVM disassembler and Unicorn library

Guille Polito wrote bindings to the LLVM disassembler and Pharo bindings to the Unicorn library. Both projects are available on GitHub:

https://github.com/guillep/pharo-llvmDisassembler
https://github.com/guillep/pharo-unicorn

This should allow for better machine code simulation directly within Pharo.

 

Spec2

The UI framework in Pharo receives an update. Spec2 will replace Spec over time - it is already included within upcoming Pharo 8 (which is still in development). Both run in parallel to ease migration.

Source code is also on GitHub: https://github.com/pharo-spec/Spec

It is possible to load Spec2 into latest Pharo release - Pharo 7. You will find a script on the project page. Some early documentation on Spec2 is already available as PDF booklet - but as the framework itself work in progress.

Spec2 will also allow for a binding to other backends like Gtk (which is based on Mars project from Esteban):

https://github.com/pharo-spec/mars-gtk

Booklet - Testing in Pharo

An upcoming new booklet for Pharo. It is about "Testing in Pharo" including SUnit, DrTest and other. Still work in progress but PDF is already here

Event Music Manager for Pharo - ESUG2019.

The project Event Music Manager (EMM) for Pharo from BenoƮt Verhaeghe allows us to play with music and video in Pharo. It will also be shown on ESUG 2019 conference.

Source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/badetitou/EMM

It uses Seaside web framework and a special UFFI binding to the VLC lib which is also available on GitHub;

    https://github.com/badetitou/Pharo-LibVLC

VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.


 Go check the trailer:

GistBrowser for Pharo

There is a nice GistBrowser for Pharo - now also including Gist Press support.
Code is on GitHub:

    https://github.com/brackendev/GistBrowser-Pharo


Pharo Chip Designer

Pavel released a new project: Pharo Chip Designer - a Silicon chip layout design game written in Pharo Code is on GitHub:

https://github.com/pavel-krivanek/PharoChipDesigner



Sample Video is here:

Woden 3D engine for Pharo - ESUG 2019 Demo

ESUG 2019 conference is ahead and Ronie Salgado is preparing a demo of his 3D engine Woden - written in Pharo.
 



Spider

The page http://vastgoodies.com allows to browse VAST ENVY goodies.

The "Spider" project from Jan van de Sandt (http://github.com/jvdsandt/spider) seems to allow similar but for the ST source graph of git and MC projects. Work in progress - but nice example for P3/Glorp, Seaside and Pharo  usage if you have a deeper look at the code. Nice!