October 2019 - Pharo-users - lists.pharo.org

Re: [Pharo-users] [ ANN ] Neo Universal Binary JSON

by Noury Bouraqadi

Excellent! Thanks Sven for this as well as for all your other contributions to the community. Noury > On 9 Oct 2019, at 14:29, Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven(a)stfx.eu> wrote: > > Hi, > > I just published an implementation of Universal Binary JSON (UBJSON) for Pharo. > > https://github.com/svenvc/NeoUniversalBinaryJSON > > Universal Binary JSON (UBJSON) is a computer data interchange format. It is a binary form directly imitating JSON, but requiring fewer bytes of data. It aims to achieve the generality of JSON, combined with being easier and more efficient to process than JSON. > > http://ubjson.org > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBJSON > > The size/speed/efficiency differences are minor for typical JSON payloads, especially compared with compacted JSON. The implementation is simpler, though, as there is no string escaping and no number parsing. > > UBJSON is making a larger difference when dealing with arrays containing numbers. Especially with ByteArrays, UBJSON makes a huge difference, since these are essentially stored natively. > > Sven > >

Oct. 9, 2019

Re: [Pharo-users] Number to VT_DECIMAL

by eftomi

Thanks for the explanation and solution - it works flawlessly and efficient :-) -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

Oct. 9, 2019

[ ANN ] Neo Universal Binary JSON

by Sven Van Caekenberghe

Hi, I just published an implementation of Universal Binary JSON (UBJSON) for Pharo. https://github.com/svenvc/NeoUniversalBinaryJSON Universal Binary JSON (UBJSON) is a computer data interchange format. It is a binary form directly imitating JSON, but requiring fewer bytes of data. It aims to achieve the generality of JSON, combined with being easier and more efficient to process than JSON. http://ubjson.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBJSON The size/speed/efficiency differences are minor for typical JSON payloads, especially compared with compacted JSON. The implementation is simpler, though, as there is no string escaping and no number parsing. UBJSON is making a larger difference when dealing with arrays containing numbers. Especially with ByteArrays, UBJSON makes a huge difference, since these are essentially stored natively. Sven

Oct. 9, 2019

Re: [Pharo-users] Spec2 and Gtk3

by Shaping

The project is currently in development and should have a stable version for the Pharo 8 release. When does the Pharo 8 release happen? Shaping

Oct. 9, 2019

Re: [Pharo-users] Spec2 and Gtk3

by Cyril Ferlicot

On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 11:47 AM Shaping <shaping(a)uurda.org> wrote: > > Is there an ETA for Pharo's Spec2 with Gtk3 bindings? > Hi, The project is currently in development and should have a stable version for the Pharo 8 release. > When is the earliest I can test it? > > > Shaping > > > -- Cyril Ferlicot https://ferlicot.fr

Oct. 9, 2019

Spec2 and Gtk3

by Shaping

Is there an ETA for Pharo's Spec2 with Gtk3 bindings? When is the earliest I can test it? Shaping

Oct. 9, 2019

Re: [Pharo-users] Pharo: Git and GUI speed; JS widget reuse in PharoJS

by Esteban Maringolo

On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 10:50 AM Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm(a)gmail.com> wrote: > There are a lot of things to consider, not just the native widgets. > For example: how do you run those widgets? Because you need an event loopâ¦ and while linux and windows do not care in which thread you run this, macOS requires you to run it in the main thread. > This means you need to run the VM using one of two strategies: > > 1) using the idle signal of Gtk (in case of gtk, but other frameworks have similar things). This is of course suboptimal and forget about real-time processing. > 2) running the VM in a separated thread. This works as expected (and it also follow apple application design recommendations) but then you need to make sure the communication between the main thread and your vm thread work as expected (and is not so easy) > > With Pablo we are working on (2), and I have to say that yes, if you do not manage well things, you will not have more speed âjust becauseâ :) This is great. Android does the same thing as MacOS, and it is even enforced by the OS, it will mark any app as unresponsive if it blocks the UI thread. You can fork Threads that communicate with the UI thread by means of a "Handler" [1], to map this using a dynamic language is simpler, but you'd need an event loop in the UI first (I don't know whether we have this in Pharo). Regards, [1] https://developer.android.com/training/multiple-threads/communicate-ui Esteban A. Maringolo

Oct. 9, 2019

Re: [Pharo-users] Pharo: Git and GUI speed; JS widget reuse in PharoJS

by Shaping

On 9 Oct 2019, at 10:33, giorgio ferraris <giorgio.ferraris(a)gmail.com <mailto:giorgio.ferraris@gmail.com> > wrote: for what I know it's the way it's integrated with the underlain OS. On windows things are much, much better. VW emulates GUIs well, but I would not expect it to beat native. I would restate it as : I would not expect native to be slower that emulated.... :) seems the same, but not exactlyâ¦ There are a lot of things to consider, not just the native widgets. For example: how do you run those widgets? Because you need an event loopâ¦ and while linux and windows do not care in which thread you run this, macOS requires you to run it in the main thread. Okay. This means you need to run the VM using one of two strategies: 1) using the idle signal of Gtk (in case of gtk, but other frameworks have similar things). This is of course suboptimal and forget about real-time processing. Yes. 2) running the VM in a separated thread. This works as expected (and it also follow apple application design recommendations) but then you need to make sure the communication between the main thread and your vm thread work as expected (and is not so easy) How efficient is the signaling/queuing between the threads? Shaping On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 4:17 AM Shaping <shaping(a)uurda.org <mailto:shaping@uurda.org> > wrote: Regarding native widget, on the VW side the usage on them brought slowness on the OSX platform. Windows platform is speedy, but OSX platform is slower using native widget than with emulated ones. So native widget alone are not always a solution. Thatâs interesting and unexpected (I donât use OSX). I would think that something is wrong with the VW native implementation or interface to it. VW emulates GUIs well, but I would not expect it to beat native. Shaping On Mon, Oct 7, 2019 at 2:08 PM Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm(a)gmail.com <mailto:estebanlm@gmail.com> > wrote: On 7 Oct 2019, at 12:39, Shaping <shaping(a)uurda.org <mailto:shaping@uurda.org> > wrote: I haven't seen is the instability of the VM you mention, it has worked pretty well for my average use, although the UX is not straightforward. Yes, lots of redirection and extra steps. Many degrees of freedom. Seemingly no good default âhappyâ path to simplify things a little before you start to investigate the variations/choices. > The other thing that keeps me planted firmly in VW is the sheer speed of it. I don't know if there are recent benchmarks, but I've felt Pharo to be really fast compared to VW when it comes to computing. Iâve donât plenty of informal comparative testing mostly with the GUI. Iâve used VW continuously for 29 years and Pharo on and off since 2006. (Iâm really trying to port, but I keep failing to do it; getting closer). VW is still noticeably quicker in GUI responsiveness, in most cases. One big difference is the Pharo HTTP client, with all those wonderful primitives. Itâs about twice as fast as VWâs. Bravo. I meant to tell that to Sven recently, and forgot. > Pharo looks generally much better, but itâs mushy, and thatâs a problem. VW is not. Working regularly with VW or VAST when I go back to Pharo the "mushiness" is significantly noticeable, but if you open a Pharo 3 image (or even Pharo 4) you'll feel it really "snappy", but of course you'll lose all the improvements since then; and that's the current tradeoff.â Yeah, I guess all the new slick GUIs are a bit heavier. This machine is just okay for speed â2.7 GHz Xeon, but VW feels okay. Pharo tends to put me slowly to sleep with the tiny but noticeable lags here and there. Iâm very fond of GT. Beautiful. Not sure what to do go get the GUI quickness back. Maybe you guys are waiting for the new GUI framework(s) to firm up? I tried Cuis, and was not impressed. Itâs too lean/Spartan and still not very fast (slower in some ways than Pharo). I like the Pharo creature-comforts (who wouldnât?). I never understood the reason for the incremental slowdown, it is even present in "modern" tools such as GTToolkit. Yes, itâs like a creeping disease. Lol Another thing I miss enough to want to implement (or fake-out somehow) is Alt-tabbing as a way to get around thru your browsers. Usually I have 4 to 6 up at once, if Iâm behaving, and as many as 20 if Iâm not. Looking about for the tabs at the bottom to click is not nearly as fun as Alt-Tabbing. Maybe I could emulate Alt-Tab with Alt-Shift-Tabâa bit of a finger twister, but it might work. > Gestural dynamics are very quick, well under 100 ms latency, often less than 20 ms. > Iâm seeing 100, 150, and 200 ms regularly in Pharo. Itâs too mushy, and that slows the mind. > Any developer understands this, whether he talks about it or not. This is true, below 20ms is ideal, and top-notch CLI terminals are benchmarking this as a selling point (using stuff like <https://github.com/pavelfatin/typometer> https://github.com/pavelfatin/typometer) Sublime, TextEdit, Notepad++ measure sub 10ms latency. Indeed. My whole nervous system definitely feels this speed effect and starts to thought-glide better below these tiny latencies. Iâm sure many reading this have had similar experiences. Something similar happens when you are fortunate enough to use a machine with extremely fast striped SSD drives, where you literally donât wait for anything, except the bloody internet. This doesnât just change the speed at which you do the work. It reorganizes your mind and skills in ways you had not anticipated because you can flow so much more quickly, making connections further forward and backward in your thought stream. My point is that if the speed and low-latencies are made a priority, we can attract users just on this basis alone. Even I would be working harder at improving Pharo (and complaining less) if everything were snappy. I would probably just get on with doing the needed tasks. Interesting how that works. Speed: it changes you. It changes the whole game. > So Iâm wondering when the Pharo GUI will snap as well as VW. Maybe with native widgets there will be a significant speedup, although I don't know whether the lag comes from rendering time or from something else. I would like to know more about the native widgets in Pharo. Does anyone know when this is likely to happen? I know, since Iâm doing it :) Native widgets (more like âgtk widgetsâ. This is technically just native under linux, but Gtk3 works very well both in Windows and Mac (you just has to ship it) will be available for development in Pharo 8. Now, moving the whole Pharo into it will take a bit longer, and we hope to be able to have a âPharo Gtk experienceâ for Pharo 9 (lots of tools to migrate to Spec2). Esteban But VW event model is not better than Pharo's, so it might be something else. Iâve not looked into the details, but I will sometimes just repeatedly click on a method name and watch how long the code pane takes to render in VW and Pharo, and I donât get what Pharo could be doing to make that time so long. Both are indexing into the sources file or the changes file to get some text, and then there is the TT-font rendering, which is probably where the CPU cycles are going. I should look into if further, but Iâm sure someone reading this knows enough about the rendering path to say where the bottleneck is. Cheers, Shaping

Oct. 9, 2019

Re: [Pharo-users] Pharo: Git and GUI speed; JS widget reuse in PharoJS

by Shaping

for what I know it's the way it's integrated with the underlain OS. On windows things are much, much better. VW emulates GUIs well, but I would not expect it to beat native. I would restate it as : I would not expect native to be slower that emulated.... :) seems the same, but not exactly... Indeed. I donât follow OSX design, but would not expect such poor native performance from Apple. I donât get it. Shaping On Wed, Oct 9, 2019 at 4:17 AM Shaping <shaping(a)uurda.org <mailto:shaping@uurda.org> > wrote: Regarding native widget, on the VW side the usage on them brought slowness on the OSX platform. Windows platform is speedy, but OSX platform is slower using native widget than with emulated ones. So native widget alone are not always a solution. Thatâs interesting and unexpected (I donât use OSX). I would think that something is wrong with the VW native implementation or interface to it. VW emulates GUIs well, but I would not expect it to beat native. Shaping On Mon, Oct 7, 2019 at 2:08 PM Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm(a)gmail.com <mailto:estebanlm@gmail.com> > wrote: On 7 Oct 2019, at 12:39, Shaping <shaping(a)uurda.org <mailto:shaping@uurda.org> > wrote: I haven't seen is the instability of the VM you mention, it has worked pretty well for my average use, although the UX is not straightforward. Yes, lots of redirection and extra steps. Many degrees of freedom. Seemingly no good default âhappyâ path to simplify things a little before you start to investigate the variations/choices. > The other thing that keeps me planted firmly in VW is the sheer speed of it. I don't know if there are recent benchmarks, but I've felt Pharo to be really fast compared to VW when it comes to computing. Iâve donât plenty of informal comparative testing mostly with the GUI. Iâve used VW continuously for 29 years and Pharo on and off since 2006. (Iâm really trying to port, but I keep failing to do it; getting closer). VW is still noticeably quicker in GUI responsiveness, in most cases. One big difference is the Pharo HTTP client, with all those wonderful primitives. Itâs about twice as fast as VWâs. Bravo. I meant to tell that to Sven recently, and forgot. > Pharo looks generally much better, but itâs mushy, and thatâs a problem. VW is not. Working regularly with VW or VAST when I go back to Pharo the "mushiness" is significantly noticeable, but if you open a Pharo 3 image (or even Pharo 4) you'll feel it really "snappy", but of course you'll lose all the improvements since then; and that's the current tradeoff.â Yeah, I guess all the new slick GUIs are a bit heavier. This machine is just okay for speed â2.7 GHz Xeon, but VW feels okay. Pharo tends to put me slowly to sleep with the tiny but noticeable lags here and there. Iâm very fond of GT. Beautiful. Not sure what to do go get the GUI quickness back. Maybe you guys are waiting for the new GUI framework(s) to firm up? I tried Cuis, and was not impressed. Itâs too lean/Spartan and still not very fast (slower in some ways than Pharo). I like the Pharo creature-comforts (who wouldnât?). I never understood the reason for the incremental slowdown, it is even present in "modern" tools such as GTToolkit. Yes, itâs like a creeping disease. Lol Another thing I miss enough to want to implement (or fake-out somehow) is Alt-tabbing as a way to get around thru your browsers. Usually I have 4 to 6 up at once, if Iâm behaving, and as many as 20 if Iâm not. Looking about for the tabs at the bottom to click is not nearly as fun as Alt-Tabbing. Maybe I could emulate Alt-Tab with Alt-Shift-Tabâa bit of a finger twister, but it might work. > Gestural dynamics are very quick, well under 100 ms latency, often less than 20 ms. > Iâm seeing 100, 150, and 200 ms regularly in Pharo. Itâs too mushy, and that slows the mind. > Any developer understands this, whether he talks about it or not. This is true, below 20ms is ideal, and top-notch CLI terminals are benchmarking this as a selling point (using stuff like <https://github.com/pavelfatin/typometer> https://github.com/pavelfatin/typometer) Sublime, TextEdit, Notepad++ measure sub 10ms latency. Indeed. My whole nervous system definitely feels this speed effect and starts to thought-glide better below these tiny latencies. Iâm sure many reading this have had similar experiences. Something similar happens when you are fortunate enough to use a machine with extremely fast striped SSD drives, where you literally donât wait for anything, except the bloody internet. This doesnât just change the speed at which you do the work. It reorganizes your mind and skills in ways you had not anticipated because you can flow so much more quickly, making connections further forward and backward in your thought stream. My point is that if the speed and low-latencies are made a priority, we can attract users just on this basis alone. Even I would be working harder at improving Pharo (and complaining less) if everything were snappy. I would probably just get on with doing the needed tasks. Interesting how that works. Speed: it changes you. It changes the whole game. > So Iâm wondering when the Pharo GUI will snap as well as VW. Maybe with native widgets there will be a significant speedup, although I don't know whether the lag comes from rendering time or from something else. I would like to know more about the native widgets in Pharo. Does anyone know when this is likely to happen? I know, since Iâm doing it :) Native widgets (more like âgtk widgetsâ. This is technically just native under linux, but Gtk3 works very well both in Windows and Mac (you just has to ship it) will be available for development in Pharo 8. Now, moving the whole Pharo into it will take a bit longer, and we hope to be able to have a âPharo Gtk experienceâ for Pharo 9 (lots of tools to migrate to Spec2). Esteban But VW event model is not better than Pharo's, so it might be something else. Iâve not looked into the details, but I will sometimes just repeatedly click on a method name and watch how long the code pane takes to render in VW and Pharo, and I donât get what Pharo could be doing to make that time so long. Both are indexing into the sources file or the changes file to get some text, and then there is the TT-font rendering, which is probably where the CPU cycles are going. I should look into if further, but Iâm sure someone reading this knows enough about the rendering path to say where the bottleneck is. Cheers, Shaping

Oct. 9, 2019

Re: [Pharo-users] Number to VT_DECIMAL

by Richard O'Keefe

Whoops, Visual Age uses 17 BYTES, not 17 BITS. Slaps own wrist. On Wed, 9 Oct 2019 at 22:03, Richard O'Keefe <raoknz(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > VT_DECIMAL sounds like a very close match to ScaledDecimal. > Or it would if ScaledDecimal were consistently implemented between Smalltalks. > The intent behind ScaledDecimal in the ANSI Smalltalk standard appears to > have been an (m,p) representation where m and p are Integers standing for > m * 10^p, for interoperation with DECIMAL fields in SQL databases (and of > course with legacy code in COBOL and PL/I). This > seems clear enough: 'Scaled decimal objects provide a precise representation of > decimal fractions with an explicitly specified number of fractional digits.' > > That's not what VisualWorks, Squeak, and Pharo actually do. Instead > they use a (q,p) > representation where q is an *arbitrary* Fraction and p just says how many > decimal places to *print*. This leads to some very confusing results, and means > that the class *invented* to handle decimal fixed point is no more > helpful to you in > Pharo than Fraction is. The reason VW gives is that it "seems useful" that > 1000s0/7 * 7 should equal 1000s0, but that's actually *not* a useful > property for an > interoperability class. If I want a Fraction, I know where to find > it, and if I want it > printed to a certain number of decimal places, I know how to do *that* without > needing a complete number class for the purpose. > > VisualAge Smalltalk represents a decimal number as an array of 17 bits, which is > a bit more adequate than VT_DECIMAL, and is precisely the IBM mainframe > "packed decimal" format with an extra byte for a scale. > > So what should you do? Basically, a VT_DECIMAL is a pair (m,p,s) where > m between: 0 and: (2 raisedTo: 96) - 1, p between: 0 and: 28, and > s between: 0 and 1. So > > Number > methods for: 'converting' > asVtDecimalParts: p "p is the desired scale" > |m s| > s := 0. > m := (self * (10 raisedToInteger: p)) rounded. > m < 0 ifTrue: [s := 1. m := m negated]. > ^Array with: m with: p with: s > > Note that with a Fraction, saying "is the denominator a power of 10, > and if so which?" > won't work, because 7/5 has a denominator that is not a power of 10 but it is > exactly representable as 1.4s1. And in both ANSI Smalltalk and VT_DECIMAL, > the numbers 1.4s1, 1.40s2, 1.400s3, and so on are distinguishable. So the scale > *has* to be something over and above the numeric value. To put it another way, > the scale is determined by what the external application WANTS, not what the > Smalltalk code HAS. > > On Wed, 9 Oct 2019 at 09:24, eftomi <tomaz.turk(a)ef.uni-lj.si> wrote: > > > > Hi, I'm preparing a method to write a given Pharo's numerical value into an > > external variant of type VT_DECIMAL. The purpose of this type is to retain > > accuracy, it uses 12 bytes for "mantissa" and two bytes for a sign and a > > scale (i. e. the position of decimal point). What would be the best approach > > for the conversion, taken all the possible subclasses of class Number, that > > is a Float, a Fraction and the Integers, and to keep the accuracy at the > > same level? > > > > For instance, Fraction's numerator and denominator could be directly imputed > > into VT_DECIMAL's value and scale if denominator is a power of 10. What to > > do in other cases? > > > > A nice description of VT_DECIMAL is here > > <https://bytecomb.com/vba-internals-decimal-variables-and-pointers-in-depth/> > > . > > > > Best wishes, > > Tomaz > > > > > > > > -- > > Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html > >

Oct. 9, 2019