July 2026 - Pharo-users - lists.pharo.org

Pharo Mailinglist moved to new setup: pharo-users@lists.pharo.org

by Marcus Denker

We have moved the Pharo Mailinglists to a new setup. If you see this mail, you are subscribed to the mailinglist pharo-users(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

July 30, 2026

Pillar loaded for Pier

by John Borden

Since this address shows up as "any question is welcome" I thought asking here may help. I have a couple small updates for Pillar (email addresses and testing package load order, and I’ve ran into issues since the Dev-8 branch of Pillar-Markup loads the Dev-7 branch of Pillar core. Is anyone aware of why this is setup this way? In testing a change to make them consistent I wound up with a pier image that had every link point to root. I’m still working through the failed tests but was hoping someone would remember why this is configured like that. Thanks, John

July 30, 2026

[ANN] Soil v5

by Norbert Hartl

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

July 29, 2026

[ANN] JSONSchema: bringing test suite conformance up

by Norbert Hartl

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

July 28, 2026

Mailinglists: Moving to new system

by Marcus Denker

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

July 28, 2026

[ANN] pharo-cig FFI bindings for libcurl

by Esteban Lorenzano

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

July 14, 2026