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.