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[ANN] Soil v5
by Norbert Hartl July 30, 2026

July 30, 2026

We are happy to announce the availability of Soil version 5. What is new? Automatic change tracking: Soil now computes a recursive content hash for objects and uses it to detect modifications automatically. This removes the need for the explicit markDirty: calls that were previously required — something we called out as a goal back in the v4 announcement. Read-only transactions have been hardened: we now distinguish a transaction that is intentionally read-only from one that just happens to end up with no changes, and read-only transactions abort automatically instead of committing a no-op. Indexed collections (SoilPersistentDictionary and indexed dictionaries) can now be used as non-root objects, not just at the root of the database. A first working garbage collector has landed — a preview, not a finished feature: Soil>>garbageCollect compacts object segments offline by cloning and atomically swapping them in. There's also a new opt-in Soil>>checkConsistency you can run separately without slowing down the GC itself. The data-layer primitives for a future online/segment-based GC are also in place, though not yet wired up. A new SoilCommitError hierarchy lets you catch any commit-time failure with one exception class instead of several unrelated ones. A good number of crash and silent-data-corruption fixes, notably around the graph exporter/importer, backup version history, and depth-first traversal. Full changelog: https://github.com/ApptiveGrid/Soil/blob/main/docs/versions/changelog-v5.md I also wrote up the release on the blog, with a bit more context: https://norbert.hartl.name/blog/2026-07-29_soil-v5-released.html What is planned next? Integrating the Windows support work that's already sitting there Process-specific variables A preview of an online GC, building on the primitives that landed in v5 Multi-index collections and partial indexes (carried over from v4's plan) Hope you like it. Give it a spin and then tell us! Norbert & Marcus

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Pharo Mailinglist moved to new setup: pharo-dev@lists.pharo.org
by Marcus Denker July 30, 2026

July 30, 2026

We have moved the Pharo Mailinglists to a new setup. If you see this mail, you are subscribed to the mailinglist pharo-dev(a)lists.pharo.org WARNING: We sadly could not migrate the settings for the subscribers (e.g. Digest) Even though you are subscribed, you can create an *account* to manage settings / see all lists you are in. For this, sign up at http://lists.pharo.org/accounts/signup to create an account and configure the lists as you need them. (This is optional but recommended) WARNING: one state *not* migrated includes "NO MAIL", this was used e.g. by people to send with different From:, but in addition, it seems that the old system did put subscribers with delivery problems in this state (without anyone getting notified). If you do not want to be in this list, please unsubscribe, see footer or just send a mail to me, I will remove you. Marcus

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[ANN] JSONSchema: bringing test suite conformance up
by Norbert Hartl July 28, 2026

July 28, 2026

Hi , quick announcement: JSONSchema (https://github.com/zweidenker/JSONSchema) just got a real conformance push against the official Test-Suite (https://github.com/json-schema-org/JSON-Schema-Test-Suite) Udo ported that suite into Pharo a while back — over 1000 individual test methods — but it sat mostly unexplored until now. Claude and me went through it bucket by bucket and moved from roughly a third of the suite genuinely passing to about two-thirds: boolean schemas, oneOf/anyOf/not/pattern, dependencies, const, contains, patternProperties, if/then/else, tuple-shaped items, and a long list of format validators. For more information I’ve wrote an article: https://norbert.hartl.name/blog/2026-07-28_jsonschema-picked-back-up.html Feedback welcome, as always. Norbert

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Mailinglists: Moving to new system
by Marcus Denker July 28, 2026

July 28, 2026

Hi, We are moving the Pharo lists to a new setup. I will send another mail when this is done (end of the week latest). The lists will continue to work, but the archives will be migrated with a certain export date (I guess today). Marcus

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[ANN] pharo-cig FFI bindings for libcurl
by Esteban Lorenzano July 14, 2026

July 14, 2026

Hello, I am publishing bindings for libcurl at pharo-cig. Technically, this is not new as I generate the recipe and the bindings almost one year ago... but I forgot to commit it, as it was made while making tests on how to handle variadics :) I think the library can be useful, even if we do not need it for most common cases (we already have Zinc/Zodiac to handle downloads), but it may be useful in certain cases (e.g. to download in parallel, without putting pressure in the image, etc.). libcurl bindings are now part of the garden: https://github.com/pharo-cig/pharo-libcurl Esteban

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Kent Beck re AI and software
by Aik-Siong Koh July 8, 2026

July 8, 2026

https://finance.biggo.com/news/9097cf7df0ff00c3

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ANN: Experimental flatpak pharo vm v10.3.9
by Esteban Lorenzano July 3, 2026

July 3, 2026

Hello, As some of you may know, Iâve been working on a Flatpak for the Pharo VM. After some work, I think I finally have a version thatâs ready to be tested, so please give it a try! You can find it here: https://forge.smallworks.eu/pharo/pharo-vm-flatpak Just follow the installation instructions in the repo. A few notes: * This is still a regular Pharo VM, but the bundled dependencies are the ones used by Pharo 14. This matters especially for Iceberg, since it uses libgit2 1.9.4. * For FFI, I had to update UnifiedFFI in Pharo 14 so it can find libraries in the right places. Since Flatpak runs in a sandbox, host libraries, when needed, are exposed under |/run/host/...|. The Pharo run script already adapts |LD_LIBRARY_PATH| for this, but uFFI does not use it. * This is a full VM with quite a few dependencies, including the GNOME runtime, because it is also part of another project that needs them. You can snoop around the repo, or wait for my ESUG talk to hear more about that. ;) * I tested it on my own Arch system and on Ubuntu 24. That said, it may still need some tweaks on other systems, or even on different machines running those same systems, so please let me know how it goes. :) Cheers ! Esteban

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Default development branch moved to Pharo15
by Esteban Lorenzano June 30, 2026

June 30, 2026

Hello, I moved the pharo-project/pharo repository to Pharo15 branch. New features need to go there :) cheers ! Esteban

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A note on the Pharo 14 release
by Esteban Lorenzano June 26, 2026

June 26, 2026

Hello Pharo users and developers, You may have noticed that our usual AprilâMay release did not happen this yea. We wanted to explain why Pharo 14 has been delayed, and why we are still not quite at the point where we want to release it. There is not much mystery: we got very ambitious about what we wanted to include. We are still finishing a few important pieces that we believe need to be part of this release, as they will provide foundations for the next development cycle. Here is a non-exhaustive list of what we are aiming to include: * Massive changes in the VM (v12) * Migration to SDL3 as the backend * Alexandria, as a future replacement for Athens * A Bloc preview â yes! * Toplo, the new widget set based on Bloc, and a SpecâToplo preview * And many other things that are not polished enough yet So, yes, we are disappointed not to have met our usual release cycle. But we believe the extra time will be worth it â once we get there :) Cheers, Esteban

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An Inference engine inside Pharo for LLMs
by omar abedelkader June 26, 2026

June 26, 2026

Hello everyone, for the first time, we have the first prototype of an inference engine without any connection to any of the external provider like Ollama, LMStudio, or vLLM. https://github.com/pharo-llm/pharo-inferï¿¼ pharo-llm/pharo-infer: pharo-infer is a inference engine inside Pharo github.com ï¿¼ â OA

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