August 2022 - Pharo-dev - lists.pharo.org

Sockets not working under heavy VM load?
by Pavel Krivanek Oct. 3, 2023

Oct. 3, 2023

Hi, we have some performance issues with Glorp over P3 and, after some investigation, I have a theory that could explain it. And I would like to know your opinion if it is correct. To reproduce this issue, you can try something easy. Just create a process with normal or higher priority that will try to read something from a socket. And, in parallel, do in a separate thread an operation that takes all the processor time for several seconds. ```` [ 5 seconds wait. Time now traceCr. ZnClient new url: 'https://www.google.com'; get. Time now traceCr. ] forkAt: 60. [1000 timesRepeat: [ 10000 factorial ] ] timeToRun ```` (you may try a different safe server address) The processes run in parallel until the time when the first process tries to obtain data from the socket. Then it hangs and waits until finishing of the second process. My theory is that the VM socket plugin is able to receive incoming data from the connection and save it into the buffer. In the meantime, the reading process is waiting on the socket semaphore. But it looks like the plugin is not able to release the semaphore while the VM is actually doing something. It needs to wait until the VM has nothing useful to do, and then it is finally able to release the semaphores so Pharo processes are resumed and can start to read. Is my theory right? Cheers, -- Pavel

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Inovation Technology Award Submission: Polyphemus
by pmissech Dec. 27, 2022

Dec. 27, 2022

Hello, Although i will not be able to attend ESUG'22, a friend agreed to present one of our projects to the innovation award. **Polyphemus** is aÂ VM related, but public aims at any kind of developers. Particularly, the video submission talks about how to look at an image and how to **recover** dead images. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions ! Enjoy (and vote for Polyphemus!). 5 minutes video, Innovation Technology Award submission: https://youtu.be/zf3cCtNW830 Repository: github.com/hogoww/Polyphemus/ Additionnal information on image recovery: https://github.com/hogoww/Polyphemus/blob/main/Documentation/ResurrectingDe… Cheers !

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Recommendation for password encryption?
by Mariano Martinez Peck Sept. 30, 2022

Sept. 30, 2022

Hi guys. Some time ago I asked about the best way to encrypt a password. Some of the recommendations I got was: 1) Generally for passwords you do not write a decrypt method for security purposes (eg you do not want people to be able to reverse engineer the encrypted password easily) 2) put a little salt 3) There is http://www.squeaksource.com/Cryptography/PasswordHashingFFI 4) I should not decrypt password but instead I should compare both encrypted versions to see if they are equal. My scenario is the following. I need to store database passwords in text files. So I don't want to let them as plain text. And while I understand 4), I think it's a different scenario than mine. I know that some database driver may allow you to directly send the encrypted password. But still...I have another similar scenario in which I have to store a password and then send it (unencrypted)...so I kind of really need a bi-directional encryption. Now..I would try to avoid having an external library + FFI. Any ideas what is the best thing I can do? And how could I solve 1) if I want bidirectional like in my case? Thanks in advance, -- Mariano http://marianopeck.wordpress.com

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Equality/Hash Modification and Image Rehashing
by sean＠clipperadams.com Sept. 7, 2022

Sept. 7, 2022

>From Pharo Discord: IIUC when I change the comparison behavior of a class (i.e. reimplement #= and #hash), sets containing those objects start acting oddly e.g. happily storing duplicates of equal objects and failing to find objects they contain. A solution seems to be Set allSubInstances do: #rehash. Is my understanding correct? If so, I find it odd that I've been using and researching Smalltalk for well over a decade and I never remember reading/hearing about this. I wonder if it can be baked into the IDE somehow e.g. via a critic... And stephan responded: > The mailing list posts about that I remember were at the time where the number of object bits used for the hash were increased. --- Following up on his clue, I found [this old post](https://lists.pharo.org/empathy/thread/LKCE5UXYPXPLVOGNZYW64BWHYJY5NM… "this old post"), which seems to confirm my suspicion. This seems like a serious trap for users to fall into (Iâm having flashbacks to my C++ days lol). So, can/should we somehow handle this in the IDE? Something like a refactoring (that has a confirmation window) that gives you the choice to rehash image collections when redefining these methods? In a 1GB image, \`Set allSubInstances do: #rehash\` is almost instantaneous and \`Dictionary allSubInstances do: #rehash\` takes several seconds.

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Change notification: squeaksource.com migration to new service provider today
by David T. Lewis Aug. 31, 2022

Aug. 31, 2022

As part of an overall project to move squeak.org services to a new service provider (hetzner.com) the https://squeaksource.com server will be migrated today, 31 August, beginning at 20:00 UTC. Due to time required for DNS updates to propagate, the change will take effect over a number of hours (expect up to one day). This is the general purpose squeaksource.com server, and does not affect http://source.squeak.org, which will be migrated separately at a later date. What you need to know: For most people, no change will be noticed. Read access to repositories will continue with little or no interruption. If you are committing updates to existing projects, there is a risk of those updates being committed to the "wrong" server during the transition period. No data or files will be lost, but some updates may need to be re-applied. The squeaksource.com administrator will be watching for this and will either fix any missing updates or request the affected project administrator to do so. If you are a project administrator or if you are planning to create a new project on squeaksource.com, please avoid making changes during the transition period. In the event of problems, please report the concern here on the squeak-dev list. If you do not have access to that list, you can report the concern to lewis(a)mail.msen.com. Dave

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Platform Packages vs. Git Branches
by sean＠clipperadams.com Aug. 30, 2022

Aug. 30, 2022

Iâve always supported multiple platforms (e.g. different Pharo versions) via packages like MyProject-Plaform-Pharo9. Thinking back, the primary reason is that is how I saw it done by other projects. Also, I adopted the practice well before git was in wide use in the Pharo world. However, Jan Bliznicenko recently suggested an alternate workflow which sounds like how Pharo itself is managed: use git branches, with the primary branch supporting only latest Pharo, and other branches only getting critical bug fixes backported. Not sure how that would work for projects that support other dialects e.g. Gemstone and Squeak, since there would then be multiple âlatest versionsâ. Iâm interested in opinions about these options as I feel that Magritte is an important community asses and want to keep it compatible on as many platforms as possible (with as little work as possible)! I also get the feeling that many people keep ancient systems in production, and I wonder which they would prefer - a project that is stable on a Pharo version (more or less) when that version is released or having the latest commits, especially bug fixes. Thoughts?

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This week (34/2022) on the Pharo Issue Tracker MD Marcus Denker
by Marcus Denker Aug. 26, 2022

Aug. 26, 2022

We merged 28 PRs this week: Improvements ============ - Optimize setting of initial position in PositionableStream>>on: #11555 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11555 - Rotten green tests plugin for DrTests #11513 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11513 Git Support ========= - Updating Libgit2 Bindings to version 2.2.6 #1605 https://github.com/pharo-vcs/iceberg/pull/1605 - Fix Pharo's #11370: Cannot commit when adding a class instance variable #1597 https://github.com/pharo-vcs/iceberg/pull/1597 - Update Iceberg to 2.0.8 #11581 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11581 Cleanups ======== - Cleanup typo in ASTCache>>#at: #11557 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11557 - README.md and Bootstrap cleanup #11453 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11453 - Update class comment of AsciiCharSet #11575 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11575 - Class comment for RBCommentToken #11571 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11571 - Categorize RBShortAssignmentToken>>#length like superclass #11569 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11569 - Just some formatting in a package comment #11560 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11560 - RBScanner>>#isSelectorNonBinary improve with script: pragma #11567 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11567 - Enhance isUnary method comment #11541 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11541 - Fixes: #11526 and #11527: Refactoring2-core merge and baseline fix #11529 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11529 - Typo in class comment of AllProtocol #11573 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11573 - Cleanup AthensBalloonPaint and AthensBalloonGradientPaint #11579 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11579 - Small cleanups in Object #11594 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11594 - Improve #basicSize documentation and add tests #11590 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11590 - Cleanup ReferenceFinder>>#searchIndicesIn: #11592 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11592 - Removed empty abstractCompletionEngine class #11562 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11562 - Stream should be declared as abstract class #11553 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11553 - PositionableStream should be declared as abstract class #11551 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11551 - EncodedCharSet should return true for #isAbstract #11549 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11549 Pharo10 ======= - Updating version of Iceberg to 2.0.7, for libgit 1.4.4 -- Backport to Pharo 10 #11545 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11545 - Creates Graphical UI for AndreasProfiler and TimeProfiler #11532 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11532 Pharo9 ======= - Upgrade iceberg to 2.0.7 -- backport to Pharo 9 #11546 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11546 - Update Iceberg to 2.0.8 #11582 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11582

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Status update of Libgit2 and CI issues
by Guillermo Polito Aug. 23, 2022

Aug. 23, 2022

A couple of weeks ago we got reported a big recurrent failure on CI jobs while cloning using iceberg/libgit https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/issues/11481. TL;DR; So far (Friday ~17h Paris time) we managed to get everything up and running. A new VM is being released by our CI, all pull requests are issued and we should have everything integrated by tonight. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-= More on the situation: Errors happened randomly with ``` error reading from the zlib stream ``` or ``` bad packet length ``` Several people helped in getting a reliable script to reproduce the issue, plus some instructions to produce a reproduction environment using a docker container. With that in our hands, we managed to corner the issue to a new incompatibility between old libgit2 versions, ssh2, OpenSSL, and (at least) Github. After testing some configurations, we decided to upgrade the libgit and related binaries to newer versions: - libgit 1.4.4 - libssh 1.9.0 - OpenSSL 1.1.1k This was of course not as straightforward as we would have liked. Libgit2 1.4.4 was not compatible with its older versions and broke our ffi bindings. We needed to provide new VM binaries for all our major platforms, make a new VM release, upgrade the libgit2 bindings, and make releases of the libgit2 bindings, iceberg, and backport to Pharo 10 and Pharo 9. TL;DR; So far (Friday ~17h Paris time) we managed to get everything up and running. A new VM is being released by our CI, all pull requests are issued and we should have everything integrated by tonight. Libgit+related compilation instructions are updated in the VM wiki https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/wiki/Building-OSX-ARM64-Third-Par… https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/wiki/Building-OSX-X86_64-Third-Pa… https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/wiki/Building-Linux-ARM64-Third-P… https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/wiki/Building-Linux-ARM32-Third-P… Libgit bindings Upgrade changes: https://github.com/pharo-vcs/libgit2-pharo-bindings/commit/0e0100f7d0f3a11c… release: https://github.com/pharo-vcs/libgit2-pharo-bindings/releases/tag/v2.2.6 Iceberg Upgrade pr: https://github.com/pharo-vcs/iceberg/pull/1605 release: https://github.com/pharo-vcs/iceberg/releases/tag/v2.0.7 Upgrading library dependencies in the VM https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/447 Release VM 9.0.16 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/releases/tag/v9.0.16 Backports to Pharo Pharo10 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11545 Pharo9 https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/11546 We have left for later to upgrade library dependencies for the Windows VM (x86-64, ARM64). Of course, any help in this direction is welcome. Cheers, G in behalf of the team

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What, exactly, does `#=` mean?
by sean＠clipperadams.com Aug. 23, 2022

Aug. 23, 2022

Anyone know of a book that goes in depth explaining \`#=\`? I've always wondered what "equal" is supposed to mean. For example, if I have two objects representing the same person, but one has their webpage cached as state, they represent the same entity, and are interchangeable in many contexts, but also have a difference that may be important in other contexts. Is âequalâ whatever you say it is in your domain, or is it a Smalltalk object system concept? If the latter, what is the exact expectation?

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about object serialization and deserialization
by stephane ducasse Aug. 21, 2022

Aug. 21, 2022

Hi guys It is interesting to think about the design and use of object deserializers. https://www.slideshare.net/frohoff1/deserialize-my-shorts-or-how-i-learned-…

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