Hi,

the current Pharo cannot deal very well in situations when you want to run multiple instances from one image file, especially on Windows, which complicates the setup of parallel applications.�� It is not able to work reasonably on read-only file-systems too. That's why I did the next attempt to improve this functionality of the system.

In summary:

- the image can be executed with --readOnlyMode image argument

- the basic system tries to survive such limitation. The changes file is in read-only mode and new sources are installed into compiled methods directly, Ombu does not save content, Playground does not save cache etc.

- PharoDebug.log and placeholder files on Windows are not created

- the limitation is only on image-level so it is easy to bypass it.

- the presence of the old file streams makes everything uglier and messier

We have an open PR for this issue:��https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/3837

Comments and reviews are welcome.

-- Pavel