- Pharo-users - lists.pharo.org

Re: [Pharo-users] CMD/CTRL-B for browsing?

by Marcus Denker

> On 01 Mar 2016, at 18:10, Marcus Denker <marcus.denker(a)inria.fr> wrote: > > >> On 01 Mar 2016, at 18:06, Luc Fabresse <luc.fabresse(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Hi Guys, >> >> In Pharo 5, it seems that CMD/CTRL-B does not work for browsing in some places such as in GTDebugger right bottom pane. >> Is this on purpose? >> >> > No, still a bug: in non-code mode Rubric does not add the shortcuts. We should fix that and allow these everywhere. > > I added an issue: https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/17731/Rubric-When-not-in-Code-Mode-the-ed… (Issue tracker status: - Open overall: 512 - Open tagged Pharo5: 319 - Closed last 7 days: 100 )

March 2, 2016

Re: [Pharo-users] A new idea for a project: WarpSpeed (a C inliner)

by Thierry Goubier

Le 02/03/2016 11:07, Ben Coman a Ã©crit : > On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 7:44 AM, Thierry Goubier > <thierry.goubier(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> Le 29/02/2016 00:32, Ben Coman a Ã©crit : >>> >>> On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 3:30 AM, Dimitris Chloupis >>> <kilon.alios(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>>> >>>> So now that AsmJit is gone , I had a new idea for a project and I wanted >>>> your opinion on this if you think it will be useful for the community, I >>>> call it WarpSpeed. >>>> >>>> I was thinking it would still be cool to have some kind of library that >>>> will >>>> help us boost the speed of pharo . So I was thinking about a C inliner >>>> which is far easier than an Assembly inliner (see AsmJIT) I also found >>>> TinyC >>>> >>>> http://bellard.org/tcc/ >>>> >>>> which is as you guessed a tiny c compiler 100kbs in size which i can >>>> include with a pharo image to allow me to dynamically compile inlined C >>>> code >>>> inside the pharo image so even pharo users without a C compiler installed >>>> can benefit from it . >>>> >>>> That means that if something does not perform as fast as you want you >>>> could >>>> mix C code with pharo code , I am thinking passing the C source code as a >>>> string or even having the C code in a separate file, and then dynamically >>>> call the TinyC compiler, compile it to shared library and load if via >>>> UFFI >>>> back to pharo. TinyC is very fast so compilation of the code should be as >>>> fast if not faster than compiling pharo code. >>>> >>>> Looks easy enough to do for a small project by me with the condition >>>> there >>>> are people really interested into something like this. TinyC is licensed >>>> as >>>> LGPL but I can make it fall back to other compilers as well if ones want >>>> to >>>> close the source. >>>> >>>> How it sounds as an idea ? >>> >>> >>> I've thought about something similar myself, and also looked at tcc. >>> I think its a really interesting idea, but you need to treat it as an >>> *experiment* for learning. Whether its ultimately useful to the >>> community will depend on a lot of things in implementation (I see >>> Clement indicates some difficulties). >>> >>> But maybe tcc is not the right backend. [1] says "Note: I am no longer >>> working on TCC", the last release dates wehre 2009 & 2013, and [2] >>> indicates it tcc may be a dead end. >>> >>> What would be *really* interesting is, given we have a good >>> infrastructure to compile Smalltalk to bytecode, investigate some new >>> constructs to compile to SPIR-V [3]. The specification [4] and >>> execution/memory model [5] have recently been released. It would be >>> nice if someone more competent than myself could skim and advise on >>> the feasibility of such an idea. >> >> >> SPIR-V format is similar to the LLVM-IR and it is quite hard to generate for >> a language like Smalltalk. Typed operations, SSA, Phi nodes, etc... You get >> extremely high performance this way, but it is a lot of work. >> >>> This presentation [6] starting p38 says SPIRV presents an "opportunity >>> to unleash innovation: Domain Specific Languages..." which is >>> typically considered a strength of Smalltalk. p40 says "Compiler split >>> in two, Front end compiler emits SPIR-V portable binary offline (that >>> would be us), then SPIR-V is compiled to machine-specific binary by >>> driver online (that would be just passing the SPIR-V to the GPU >>> driver). [7] >> >> >> Yes, this is certainly where SPIR-V is interesting: all OpenCL devices would >> carry a SPIR-V back-end compiler. >> >>> Perhaps interesting to see what people are trying in some other >>> languages... >>> * A bytecode translator like is being tried for Python [A], since SPIR-V >>> is >>> * End-user tools for working with SPIR-V, disassembling, analysing, >>> debugging, optimising it, for Go[B] and Python[C]. >>> >>> The opportunity in producing tools for working with SPIR-V is you draw >>> people in for the tool, and they get a side-exposure to our >>> environment, (which of course they then fall in love with.) > > >> The opportunity is more like a compiler infrastructure you'll be writing. If >> well written, yes, it could be an interesting artefact (training, teaching >> compilation). > > Back to Dimitris' original question, I wonder that the potential speed > benefit comes not so much from using "C", but from leveraging a large > body of work on optimizing passes at the lower level. I found a > tutorial [1] to produce a toy language "Kaleidoscope" that generates > LLVM IR such that "by the end of the tutorial, weâll have written a > bit less than 1000 lines of code. With this small amount of code, > weâll have built up a very reasonable compiler for a non-trivial > language including a hand-written lexer, parser, AST, as well as code > generation support with a JIT compiler." What is costly in the Pharo space is the fact that Kaleidoscope rely on the LLVM C++ infrastructure to generate the IR. And this linking to C++ code and classes is hard to do. Generating .ll files are however Ok, and then everything can be done on the command line. However, the IR is complex in itself, and not very obvious in places (vectors, types), and you have to cope with the Phi instructions and block / temporary naming / declarations and all... It represent in the end quite a significant amount of code (I have it for my R compiler work but it's company property). I tried to make it faster to build a representation of the LLVM-IR via SmaCC (build a parser of LLVM-IR to get the automatic generation of the nodes) but, after spending a week on it, I could not get a parser without conflicts, so I implemented it by hand instead. Long term, I think the LLVM-IR parser is a better investment, but I don't have anymore the time for it. After that, all llvm tools are command line, so just OSProcess like interface is good enough. > As well as a C++ version, there is also an OCaml version of the > tutorial [2], which makes me wonder what a Pharo version of the > tutorial would look like. This seems like a reasonable level for a > student project. Know any students keen to try? > > [1] http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/LangImpl1.html > [2] http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/index.html > [3] http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/PharoLangImpl1.html > > > The project outline might be... > > 1. Implement Kaleidoscope via the existing C++ tutorial > > 2. In Pharo, write a minimal FFI interface to LLVM > > 3. Re-implement the Kaleidoscope tutorial in Pharo in its simplest > form, following the existing tutorial's philosophy "to make this > tutorial maximally understandable and hackable, we choose to implement > everything in C++ instead of using lexer and parser generators" - > matching the existing tutorial as close as possible to ease acceptance > to... > > 4. Submit Pharo version of Kaleidoscope tutorial for inclusion on the > LLVM site [3]. This would provide a showcase of Pharo to a group we'd > probably never get a look in from**. In particularly where section > 3.5 says "code generation to LLVM doesnât really get us much, except > that we can look at the *pretty* IR calls" , we could demonstrate the > ease of extending our Inspector with custom views, versus their > textual presentation. Yes, this could be interesting. As far as the compiler and LLVM community goes, they are certainly interested by interesting results coming from our community, especially if we challenge boundaries: compilation of dynamic languages is a difficult and important subject, as well as targetting heterogeneous hardware. The guys I work with presented their work [1] at the LLVM devroom at this year's FOSDEM, and I'll go to CGO[2] in two weeks time. > 5. Revise the tutorial to make optimal use of our built in AST infrastructure. > > > I naively wonder if it could be possible or beneficial for Slang to > generate LLVM IR directly and cherry pick optimisation passes, with > the ability to use in-image tools to review before & after > transformation of each pass, rather than generating C first and only > getting the final result. I do think it could be interesting. I've worked a few years with compilers writing C as their back-end target and finding it really painfull to produce certain types of code structures. > ** We operate in an attention scarcity economy. Saying "come and look > at this great Thing we've got" is often not enough. It helps to be > able to say "this Thung your interested in, here's another way to look > at it (using Thing.)" Perhaps there's even an outside chance to snag > passing interest from random LLVM guys in our Cog/Spur/Sista JIT > technology. Thierry [1] https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/llvm_dataflow/ [2] http://cgo.org/cgo2016/ > > cheers -ben > >

March 2, 2016

Re: [Pharo-users] A new idea for a project: WarpSpeed (a C inliner)

by kilon.alios

That does not change the fact that you will have a FFI overhead. For example pyOpenGL 2 was implemented using the Python C API as a wrapper to OpenGL pyOpenGL3 was implemented using ctypes, the official FFI of python (cpython in particular) . Version 3 is 2 to 3 times slower than version 2. But then a FFI also has much lower maintenance cost which is the reason why they moved to a FFI implementations. Its really a difficult problem to solve and there is no blue pill solution. In my case I dont need to because Unreal has already a nice visual scripting language but I want to use Pharo with Unreal. FFI is not an option since unreal builds its own executables and I dont want to hack the engine even though its open source. So I even considered making my own language on top of pharo that will compile to C++. But obviously that is a very big effort and would mean sacrificing a lot of nice things about pharo syntax. So now I fall back to my initial "lazy" solution of shared memory files. Share memory between Pharo and Unreal , let those two process communicate via the share memory and then save the shared memory to a file so I don't lose live state. Relative easy to do since OS already support and provide such functionality. The pro: is that you can still use Pharo as it is and have access to any C++ functionality the con: you have to do all the manual work of mapping Pharo messages to C++ functionality, both at pharo but mainly at the C++ side. However your post made me wonder if I can still invent a programming language like LLVM IR, something that will be basically a protocol of communication between Pharo and C++ and even support onboard features of Unreal like GC, reflection, hot code reloading, blueprints , game editor etc. It looks like that will be the direction I will be going afterall. Seems much simpler, easier and practical than anything else. -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/A-new-idea-for-a-project-WarpSpeed-a-C-inliner-tp4881… Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

March 2, 2016

Pharo Contributors & Consultants

by Peter UhnÃ¡k

Hi all, we are currently updating the pages for Pharo Contributors and Consultants. https://consultants.pharo.org/ and https://contributors.pharo.org/ if you want to add or update your record (info, mail, image, ...), you can do so by sending us a pull request on GitHub in the appropriate repository the format is STON so it should be understandable. Contributors: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-project-contributors Consultants: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-project-consultants Alternatively you can open an issue in the github issue tracker with the new info and it will be handled. Peter

March 2, 2016

Pharo Days 2016 Registration is open

by Sven Van Caekenberghe

Registration for the Pharo Days 2016 is now open ! We are using EventBrite. You can buy tickets using PayPal and any credit card. If absolutely necessary, you can opt for an off line payment. Please register on time. http://www.eventbrite.com/e/pharo-days-2016-tickets-22454533113 For social registration you can use Doodle. http://doodle.com/poll/rsc86cqzxbgwr9tr Spread the word: http://pharodays2016.pharo.org.

March 2, 2016

Re: [Pharo-users] A new idea for a project: WarpSpeed (a C inliner)

by Ben Coman

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 7:44 AM, Thierry Goubier <thierry.goubier(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Le 29/02/2016 00:32, Ben Coman a Ã©crit : >> >> On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 3:30 AM, Dimitris Chloupis >> <kilon.alios(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>> So now that AsmJit is gone , I had a new idea for a project and I wanted >>> your opinion on this if you think it will be useful for the community, I >>> call it WarpSpeed. >>> >>> I was thinking it would still be cool to have some kind of library that >>> will >>> help us boost the speed of pharo . So I was thinking about a C inliner >>> which is far easier than an Assembly inliner (see AsmJIT) I also found >>> TinyC >>> >>> http://bellard.org/tcc/ >>> >>> which is as you guessed a tiny c compiler 100kbs in size which i can >>> include with a pharo image to allow me to dynamically compile inlined C >>> code >>> inside the pharo image so even pharo users without a C compiler installed >>> can benefit from it . >>> >>> That means that if something does not perform as fast as you want you >>> could >>> mix C code with pharo code , I am thinking passing the C source code as a >>> string or even having the C code in a separate file, and then dynamically >>> call the TinyC compiler, compile it to shared library and load if via >>> UFFI >>> back to pharo. TinyC is very fast so compilation of the code should be as >>> fast if not faster than compiling pharo code. >>> >>> Looks easy enough to do for a small project by me with the condition >>> there >>> are people really interested into something like this. TinyC is licensed >>> as >>> LGPL but I can make it fall back to other compilers as well if ones want >>> to >>> close the source. >>> >>> How it sounds as an idea ? >> >> >> I've thought about something similar myself, and also looked at tcc. >> I think its a really interesting idea, but you need to treat it as an >> *experiment* for learning. Whether its ultimately useful to the >> community will depend on a lot of things in implementation (I see >> Clement indicates some difficulties). >> >> But maybe tcc is not the right backend. [1] says "Note: I am no longer >> working on TCC", the last release dates wehre 2009 & 2013, and [2] >> indicates it tcc may be a dead end. >> >> What would be *really* interesting is, given we have a good >> infrastructure to compile Smalltalk to bytecode, investigate some new >> constructs to compile to SPIR-V [3]. The specification [4] and >> execution/memory model [5] have recently been released. It would be >> nice if someone more competent than myself could skim and advise on >> the feasibility of such an idea. > > > SPIR-V format is similar to the LLVM-IR and it is quite hard to generate for > a language like Smalltalk. Typed operations, SSA, Phi nodes, etc... You get > extremely high performance this way, but it is a lot of work. > >> This presentation [6] starting p38 says SPIRV presents an "opportunity >> to unleash innovation: Domain Specific Languages..." which is >> typically considered a strength of Smalltalk. p40 says "Compiler split >> in two, Front end compiler emits SPIR-V portable binary offline (that >> would be us), then SPIR-V is compiled to machine-specific binary by >> driver online (that would be just passing the SPIR-V to the GPU >> driver). [7] > > > Yes, this is certainly where SPIR-V is interesting: all OpenCL devices would > carry a SPIR-V back-end compiler. > >> Perhaps interesting to see what people are trying in some other >> languages... >> * A bytecode translator like is being tried for Python [A], since SPIR-V >> is >> * End-user tools for working with SPIR-V, disassembling, analysing, >> debugging, optimising it, for Go[B] and Python[C]. >> >> The opportunity in producing tools for working with SPIR-V is you draw >> people in for the tool, and they get a side-exposure to our >> environment, (which of course they then fall in love with.) > The opportunity is more like a compiler infrastructure you'll be writing. If > well written, yes, it could be an interesting artefact (training, teaching > compilation). Back to Dimitris' original question, I wonder that the potential speed benefit comes not so much from using "C", but from leveraging a large body of work on optimizing passes at the lower level. I found a tutorial [1] to produce a toy language "Kaleidoscope" that generates LLVM IR such that "by the end of the tutorial, weâll have written a bit less than 1000 lines of code. With this small amount of code, weâll have built up a very reasonable compiler for a non-trivial language including a hand-written lexer, parser, AST, as well as code generation support with a JIT compiler." As well as a C++ version, there is also an OCaml version of the tutorial [2], which makes me wonder what a Pharo version of the tutorial would look like. This seems like a reasonable level for a student project. Know any students keen to try? [1] http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/LangImpl1.html [2] http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/index.html [3] http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/PharoLangImpl1.html The project outline might be... 1. Implement Kaleidoscope via the existing C++ tutorial 2. In Pharo, write a minimal FFI interface to LLVM 3. Re-implement the Kaleidoscope tutorial in Pharo in its simplest form, following the existing tutorial's philosophy "to make this tutorial maximally understandable and hackable, we choose to implement everything in C++ instead of using lexer and parser generators" - matching the existing tutorial as close as possible to ease acceptance to... 4. Submit Pharo version of Kaleidoscope tutorial for inclusion on the LLVM site [3]. This would provide a showcase of Pharo to a group we'd probably never get a look in from**. In particularly where section 3.5 says "code generation to LLVM doesnât really get us much, except that we can look at the *pretty* IR calls" , we could demonstrate the ease of extending our Inspector with custom views, versus their textual presentation. 5. Revise the tutorial to make optimal use of our built in AST infrastructure. I naively wonder if it could be possible or beneficial for Slang to generate LLVM IR directly and cherry pick optimisation passes, with the ability to use in-image tools to review before & after transformation of each pass, rather than generating C first and only getting the final result. ** We operate in an attention scarcity economy. Saying "come and look at this great Thing we've got" is often not enough. It helps to be able to say "this Thung your interested in, here's another way to look at it (using Thing.)" Perhaps there's even an outside chance to snag passing interest from random LLVM guys in our Cog/Spur/Sista JIT technology. cheers -ben

March 2, 2016

Re: [Pharo-users] missing project from Pharo Catalog Browser

by Esteban Lorenzano

weirdâ¦ I will check the logs tomorrow (most probably a bug when reading baseline derived configurationsâ¦) Esteban > On 01 Mar 2016, at 22:48, Peter UhnÃ¡k <i.uhnak(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi, > > I've noticed that my IconFactory is missing in both Catalog Browser and http://catalog.pharo.org/ <http://catalog.pharo.org/> > > Yet I can clearly see it in MetaRepoForPharo50, > > and the following also works (loaded from MetaRepo) > > Metacello new > configuration: 'IconFactory'; > smalltalkhubUser: 'Pharo' project: 'MetaRepoForPharo50'; > load > > Did I miss something? Because it used to be there and now its gone. > > Thanks, > Peter

March 1, 2016

missing project from Pharo Catalog Browser

by Peter UhnÃ¡k

Hi, I've noticed that my IconFactory is missing in both Catalog Browser and http://catalog.pharo.org/ Yet I can clearly see it in MetaRepoForPharo50, and the following also works (loaded from MetaRepo) Metacello new configuration: 'IconFactory'; smalltalkhubUser: 'Pharo' project: 'MetaRepoForPharo50'; load Did I miss something? Because it used to be there and now its gone. Thanks, Peter

March 1, 2016

Re: [Pharo-users] CMD/CTRL-B for browsing?

by Luc Fabresse

ok. #Luc 2016-03-01 18:10 GMT+01:00 Marcus Denker <marcus.denker(a)inria.fr>: > > > On 01 Mar 2016, at 18:06, Luc Fabresse <luc.fabresse(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Hi Guys, > > > > In Pharo 5, it seems that CMD/CTRL-B does not work for browsing in some > places such as in GTDebugger right bottom pane. > > Is this on purpose? > > > > > No, still a bug: in non-code mode Rubric does not add the shortcuts. We > should fix that and allow these everywhere. > > Marcus >

March 1, 2016

Garage and VoyageMongo Pharo5 versions for the MOOC

by Luc Fabresse

Hi Guys, I am trying to prepare a ConfigurationOfPharoWeb for the MOOC on Pharo5. So I would be really greatful to have some help ;-) - Garage does not seem to load properly in Pharo 5. - VoyageMongo does not have a Pharo5 version nor a ConfigOf in the MetaRepoForPharo5 Thanks #Luc

March 1, 2016