- Pharo-users - lists.pharo.org

Pharo Mailinglist moved to new setup: pharo-users@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-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

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Pillar loaded for Pier
by John Borden July 30, 2026

July 30, 2026

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

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[ANN] Soil v5
by Norbert Hartl July 29, 2026

July 29, 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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[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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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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ANN: pharo bindings for QREncode
by Esteban Lorenzano June 22, 2026

June 22, 2026

Hello, Looking for small examples for (one of) my ESUG talks, I generate bindings forÂ this small tool: https://fukuchi.org/en/works/qrencode/ You can have things like this: https://github.com/pharo-cig/pharo-libqrencode I think it can be pretty useful :) Cheers ! Esteban

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UKSTUG Meeting: Koen De Hondt - Behaviour-Driven Development with Hera - 24 June 2026
by UK Smalltalk June 18, 2026

June 18, 2026

At ESUG 2025, Hera ( https://github.com/koendehondt/hera-for-pharo ) was introduced as a BDD framework bringing full Gherkin expressiveness to Pharo. Since then, Hera has evolved significantly â both as a framework and as a tool adopted in real-world industrial settings. After a brief introduction to Gherkin ( https://cucumber.io/docs/gherkin/reference ) for writing given-when-then scenarios, various aspects of Hera will be highlighted. A functional overview will set the scene, followed by a dive into the code to show how Hera maps Gherkin features and scenarios to Smalltalk classes and methods. During a live demo, example Gherkin scenarios for a simple Pharo Spec application will be written to explain the full scenario development cycle. Koen De Hondt ( https://be.linkedin.com/in/koendehondt ) has used Smalltalk since 1988, first as a student, then as an academic researcher, and then in industry. He holds a PhD in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (1998). In the nineties and a few years after the turn of the century, he was one of the driving forces behind the Belgian Smalltalk User Group (BSUG). In that time frame, he presented at ESUG conferences several times. In 2003, he left the Smalltalk community for other adventures. In 2023, he returned to the Smalltalk scene and started all: objects all: theTime ( https://all-objects-all-the-time.st/ ). He has been an active contributor to Pharo ever since. Software development tools are his main interest. He is the main author of the book âApplication Building with Spec 2.0â ( https://books.pharo.org/BuildingApplicationsWithSpec/ ). This will be an online meeting. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page ( https://www.meetup.com/ukstug/events/313860369/ ) to receive the meeting details.

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