November 2018 - Pharo-dev - lists.pharo.org

Slow writing to Transcript (stderr) in Windows 10 PharoConsole.exe -headless
by Christopher Fuhrman Nov. 7, 2018

Nov. 7, 2018

Hello, I encountered a performance bug in Pharo 6 under Windows 10 with Moose, starting from the Moose 6.1 (beta) image in Pharo Launcher. I migrated my code from Pharo 5 and it uses a PharoCommandLineHandler to load an MSE file, which sometimes has many (15K) warnings/errors. It was taking over a minute to run something that in Moose takes only a few seconds. To debug and make a minimal example, I removed the Moose file part of my CommandLineHandler and simulated the writing of errors (i/o) with a loop. I believe the I/O to the stderr is why the performance is bad. In Windows 10 Task Manager, I can see that the process is not using much CPU. As I recall, my code didn't have this performance problem in Pharo 5. The command in windows to execute my minimal sample is something like: C:\Users\me>Documents\Pharo\vms\61-x86\PharoConsole.exe -headless "C:\Users\me\Documents\Pharo\images\Moose Suite 6.1 (beta)\CommandHandler VM slow bug.image" mooseminer --msefile blah The last part (--msefile blah) is needed because I didn't want to remove the argument validation. Here's a copy of the image: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7cgt37lef2xh2ut/CommandHandler%20VM%20slow%20bug.… A workaround is to run without -headless (or to not have so many errors). I hope this is useful to someone. For RMOD people I'm happy to demo this on my machine. Cheers, -- Christopher Fuhrman, P.Eng, PhD *Professor in the DÃ©partement of Software and IT EngineeringÃTS (Ãcole de technologie supÃ©rieure)* http://profs.etsmtl.ca/cfuhrman +1 514 396 8638 *L'ÃTS est une constituante de l'UniversitÃ© du QuÃ©bec*

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[ANN] Pharo v7.0.0-rc1 released!
by Esteban Lorenzano Nov. 7, 2018

Nov. 7, 2018

Greetings! Iâm announcing today we reach Pharo 7.0.0-rc1! This is the first step to release a definitive version, and while we will continue integrating bug fixes, API change Pull Requests will be delayed until the open of Pharo 8.0.0 development. Now, you would wonder what is the ChangeLog of this releaseâ¦ and answer is we still do not have one (btw, we should find a way to automate this). Anywayâ¦ we are very close to release now :) Please download, test, report issues. Esteban

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Re: [Pharo-dev] [ANN] The STON Specification, Cog speed, and namespaces/modules
by Shaping Nov. 7, 2018

Nov. 7, 2018

Hi Eliot. Pharo (& Squeak & Cuis) Float subclass BoxedFloat64 maps exactly to VW's Double. In 64-bit SmallFloat64 maps exactly to SmallDouble. But I wonder whether there is any issue here. STON would use the print strings for (PSC) Float / (VW) Double, and so deseerialization on Pharo would automatically produce the right class. Going in the other direction might need some help. APF needs support in PSC before one can port, but are representable as suitably-sized word arrays. There is no support for __float128 anywhere in the VM (e.g. not even in the FFI) on PSC as yet. I see Pharoâs WordArray. Iâll work on an APF for Pharo, as time permits. Iâm using APFs in VW in the 300-bit range, and want to reduce the needed precision to 64 bits, to save space and time on large (5 million+) scalar time-series, both on the heap and during BOSSing (25 m save-time now). The problem is not so much an issue for the JulianDayNumber (JDN)-precision, which is adequate in this app at 14 to 15 digits (even though my JDN class subclasses APF, for now). Other calculations need the more extreme precision. I think I can make 128-bit floats work, and would really like to see a small, fast, boxed 128-bit float implementation in Pharo or VW. The APFs are big and slow. Where in the queue of planned improvements to Pharo does such a task lie? I suspect itâs not a very popular item. Broadening the issue somewhat, Iâm trying to find as many good reasons as possible to justify the work needed to port all my VW stuff to Pharo. Iâve seen the references to Cogâs speed and coming speed-up. Are there recent (say, in the last year) benchmarks comparing VW and Pharo? Any details here would be very much appreciated. Having no namespaces in Pharo is, I think, the biggest impediment. I prefer not to prefix class names, but there may be fewer name-collisions than I suppose--maybe none. Still, I need to know how VW and Pharo classes map in order to place overrides and extensions correctly. Besides the mentioned float-class mappings is there a reference on this? Object allSubclasses in Pharo 7 64-bit, produces 14946 classes. Pharo is a little bigger than it used to be. I suppose I donât need to check all unloaded packages because all classes in each of those will have the same unique prefix. Is that correct? Or, I could just load every package I can find, before I check names. But that little experiment has never gone well in the past. Is the Pharo-with-namespaces issue dead or merely suspended, awaiting a more fitting idea than what VW currently offers? Shaping On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 12:56 AM Shaping <shaping(a)uurda.org <mailto:shaping@uurda.org> > wrote: STON is able to serialise Pharoâs Floats, what do you mean by double ? Floating-point numbers in IEEE 64-bit format, 14 or 15 significant digits, with a range between =10^307 and 10^307. Additionally, I recently asked Sven if t would be possible to store ScaledDecimals (I think it implements what you call ArbitraryPrecisionFloats) without loss of precision. Iâm referring to VWâs Double (and SmallDouble in 64-bit engines/images). APFs are binary representations that can be arbitrarily large, using Integers (LargePositiveIntegers for example) to model the bits of the mantissa. Before, because STON extends JSON, it was storing all kind of numbers either as float or integer. Now, thanks to Sven, STON stores ScaledDecimals correctly (without loss of precision through serialisation as float, what was done before). But I do not know if this change is integrated in recent images yet. â¦.. Number subclass: #Float instanceVariableNames: '' classVariableNames: 'E Epsilon Halfpi Infinity Ln10 Ln2 MaxVal MaxValLn MinValLogBase2 NaN NegativeInfinity NegativeZero Pi RadiansPerDegree Sqrt2 ThreePi Twopi' poolDictionaries: '' category: 'Kernel-Numbers' My instances represent IEEE-754 floating-point double-precision numbers. They have about 16 digits of accuracy and their range is between plus and minus 10^307. Some valid examples are: 8.0 13.3 0.3 2.5e6 1.27e-30 1.27e-31 -12.987654e12 â¦. I see that Pharoâs Float is VWâs Double. So then I just need to be able to serialize APF. â¦. FIFloatType subclass: #FFIFloat128 instanceVariableNames: '' classVariableNames: '' poolDictionaries: '' category: 'UnifiedFFI-Types' I'm a 128bits (cuadruple precision) float. It is usually not used, but some compiler modes support it (__float128 in gcc) THIS IS NOT YET SUPPORTED â¦. The class above is also from the Pharo 7 image. This is the largest of the c-type FFIFloats. Any Float classes of this size and larger for the Smalltalk heap on 64-bit Pharo? Cheers, Shaping Le 6 nov. 2018 Ã 06:58, Shaping <shaping(a)uurda.org <mailto:shaping@uurda.org> > a Ã©crit : (Having domain problems recently. Please excuse this posting if you have seen it twice. I've not seen it appear yet on the list.) Can STON be extended to handle Doubles and ArbitraryPrecisionFloats? Shaping -----Original Message----- From: Pharo-dev [mailto:pharo-dev-bounces@lists.pharo.org] On Behalf Of David T. Lewis Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2018 14:58 To: Pharo Development List <pharo-dev(a)lists.pharo.org <mailto:pharo-dev@lists.pharo.org> > Subject: Re: [Pharo-dev] [ANN] The STON Specification This is very clear and well written. Dave Hi, Since there can never be enough documentation I finally took some time to write a more formal description of STON as a data format. https://github.com/svenvc/ston/blob/master/ston-spec.md The idea is to let this stabilise a bit and to then update the two other documents describing STON, where necessary: https://github.com/svenvc/ston/blob/master/ston-paper.md https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/job/EnterprisePharoBook/lastSuc cessfulBuild/artifact/book-result/STON/STON.html Also, the latest changes in STON have to make their way to the Pharo image as well. https://github.com/svenvc/ston All feedback is welcome. Sven -- Sven Van Caekenberghe Proudly supporting Pharo http://pharo.org http://association.pharo.org http://consortium.pharo.org -- _,,,^..^,,,_ best, Eliot

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Porting from VW to Pharo
by Shaping Nov. 6, 2018

Nov. 6, 2018

Can someone point me to the best tools for porting from VW 7.10 to Pharo 7 64-bit (or maybe 6.1)? I'm not sure what to do about the namespaces. I realize that VW's namespace solution is just a good hack and that the true nature of the problem runs much deeper--but it does a good job of avoiding class-name collisions, which is mostly what I need it for, and I can control exactly how imports work. Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks. Shaping

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[Pharo 7.0-dev] Build #1369: 22636 - Integrate Iceberg 1.4.0
by ci-pharo-ci-jenkins2＠inria.fr Nov. 6, 2018

Nov. 6, 2018

There is a new Pharo build available! The status of the build #1369 was: SUCCESS. The Pull Request #1956 was integrated: "22636 - Integrate Iceberg 1.4.0" Pull request url: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/1956 Issue Url: https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/22636 Build Url: https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-ci-jenkins2/job/Test%20pending%20pull%20request%2…

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Looking for a good shortcut for "contextual spotter"
by Esteban Lorenzano Nov. 6, 2018

Nov. 6, 2018

Hello, Most of you donât know it, but Calypso incorporates an option to show a âcontextual spotterâ which will list all available commands in the context you selected. This is meant to help on discoverability and reachability of commands available. This is *in addition to shortcuts* not a replace of them (but lets be honest, we have far more commands than those that are possible to handle with a simple shortcut). Anyway, originally I mapped this command to meta+/, which fitted well with my keyboard and language, but seems is not the case for many others (and this is not working at all on windows). So. Iâm looking for options :) So far I have this two ideas: 1- alt+enter 2- meta+h First one looks nice, but Iâm not sure it will work on all platforms/combinations. What do you think? Esteban Ps: I will also add an icon somewhere to expose the contextual spotter.

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[Pharo 7.0-dev] Build #1368: 22239-DataAndTimeTesttestAsDateAndTime-is-meaningful-2
by ci-pharo-ci-jenkins2＠inria.fr Nov. 6, 2018

Nov. 6, 2018

There is a new Pharo build available! The status of the build #1368 was: FAILURE. The Pull Request #1948 was integrated: "22239-DataAndTimeTesttestAsDateAndTime-is-meaningful-2" Pull request url: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/1948 Issue Url: https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/22239 Build Url: https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-ci-jenkins2/job/Test%20pending%20pull%20request%2…

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[Pharo 7.0-dev] Build #1367: 22560-Clean-magic-numbers-in-InputEventHandler-subclasses
by ci-pharo-ci-jenkins2＠inria.fr Nov. 6, 2018

Nov. 6, 2018

There is a new Pharo build available! The status of the build #1367 was: FAILURE. The Pull Request #1896 was integrated: "22560-Clean-magic-numbers-in-InputEventHandler-subclasses" Pull request url: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/1896 Issue Url: https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/22560 Build Url: https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-ci-jenkins2/job/Test%20pending%20pull%20request%2…

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[Pharo 7.0-dev] Build #1365: 22635-Welcome-help-should-show-build-hash-
by ci-pharo-ci-jenkins2＠inria.fr Nov. 6, 2018

Nov. 6, 2018

There is a new Pharo build available! The status of the build #1365 was: SUCCESS. The Pull Request #1955 was integrated: "22635-Welcome-help-should-show-build-hash-" Pull request url: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/1955 Issue Url: https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/22635 Build Url: https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-ci-jenkins2/job/Test%20pending%20pull%20request%2…

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[Pharo 7.0-dev] Build #1366: 22621-FileReferencemoveTo-doesnt-work-with-directories
by ci-pharo-ci-jenkins2＠inria.fr Nov. 6, 2018

Nov. 6, 2018

There is a new Pharo build available! The status of the build #1366 was: SUCCESS. The Pull Request #1949 was integrated: "22621-FileReferencemoveTo-doesnt-work-with-directories" Pull request url: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/1949 Issue Url: https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/22621 Build Url: https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-ci-jenkins2/job/Test%20pending%20pull%20request%2…

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