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GSOC 2016
by Serge Stinckwich Feb. 20, 2016

Feb. 20, 2016

Dear pharoers, this year Pharo consortium (and community) is going to take part in the Google Summer of Code event[1] as a standalone organization. This is an opportunity to promote Pharo, get some job done and have students paid. Currently we are at the most important stage as we are preparing the organization application, and hoping that we will be accepted and granted decent amount of project slots. Everyone can help with application by submitting ideas for student projects. I reuse the list of the last year : https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-project-proposals/blob/master/Topics… It is in STON format, and result is being generated at: http://gsoc.pharo.org/ Please add (or update) your ideas following the format of existing projects and open a pull request with them (you will need a github account). Preferably submit ideas with possible mentors, but if none are available at the moment ideas without mentors are also welcome. The template to submit projects is : PharoTopic new title: 'The name of your project; contact: 'email address'; supervisors: 'Supervisors names'; keywords: 'keywords separated by spaces; context: 'a description of the context of the project'; goal: 'description of the goal'; level: 'Beginner or Intermediate or Advanced'; yourself. We will need a lot of projects/idea before February 19th 2016, the deadline for applying to GSOC 2016. Do not hesitate to ask me questions. If you don't know how to edit the list, please send your project description following the template to me. [1] https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/ Regards, -- Serge Stinckwich UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC) Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk http://www.doesnotunderstand.org/

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Customised auto-completion to give priority to specific packages
by Dimitris Chloupis Feb. 20, 2016

Feb. 20, 2016

As a next step for my project Ephestos , I want to mess with auto-completion. My goal is for auto completion to give priority to the Ephestos packages. This way the Ephestos users will get recommended first auto completion of Ephestos classes and methods, I will then add a line to separate those from the rest of Pharo recommendations. I could customise this further to accomodate for any package inside pharo thus making the autocompletion prioritise your packages and classes/methods. Is there any interest for something like that ? If there is then I could make it into a separate Pharo project and make it easy to install via Package Browser (Pharo 5 configuration browser) . If there is no interest then I can keep it as part of my project and not do the extra work for separating the code. I also welcome any advice and recommendation on how to achieve this by people who already hacked auto completion. I already study the NECompletion package so I have a general idea but so far have not figure out how to priorotise recommendations.

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World lastKeystroke and openInWorld: aPasteUpMorph
by Markus Schlager Feb. 20, 2016

Feb. 20, 2016

Hi, I'm using pharo to teach smalltalk as first 'real' programming language at school. With older versions of pharo I was glad that my pupils could track keystrokes so easily by evaluating World lastKeystroke. With Pharo3.0/4.0 this only returns '<down>' independently of any keys I'm typing. f := PasteUpMorph new openInWorld. f takeKeyBoardFocus. f lastKeystroke. Is returning the empty string. Hence, my question: Is lastKeystroke broken, or how is it meant to be used now? Second problem: In older versions of pharo this would work: f := PasteUpMorph new openInWorld. b := EllipseMorph new. b openInWorld: f. But with Pharo 3.0/4.0 the last line raises an error: MessageNotUnderstood: PasteUpMorph>>startSteppingSubmorphsOf With f := WorldMorph new openInWorld. b := EllipseMorph new. b openInWorld: f. pharo freezes. So: How is openInWorld: meant to be used? Markus

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REEF examples
by recursive68＠gmail.com Feb. 19, 2016

Feb. 19, 2016

Hi, I'm trying to use REEF but can only find a few limited examples which aren't helping really. Does anyone know for example how I would update a RETextField value when a REButton is clicked ? I found this example someone answered to a the query I had but it doesn't work: REForm subclass: #MyForm instanceVariableNames: 'textFieldContents' classVariableNames: '' poolDictionaries: '' category: 'ReefSample1-View'. textFieldContents ^textFieldContents textFieldContents: aString textFieldContents := aString initializeContents self add: (RETextField new on: #textFieldContents of: self). self add: (REButton new label: 'Try me!'; callback: [ self triggerThenDo: [ self inform: self textFieldContents ]]). All it does is generate a dialog box when the button is clicked. I don't know if inform: has usage since that was written. Thanks

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Line end convention in method source
by Norbert Hartl Feb. 19, 2016

Feb. 19, 2016

I had a strange effect using a method as storage. I had a list of strings that I compiled into a method. The strings were delimited by Character lf. I created this on a Mac. Saving the source and opening the same code on a linux machine changed the line endings from lf to cr. IMHO this is a bug because I think that the content of a method should be unchanged in that case. Or are there any other reasons why this is the way it is? thanks, Norbert

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GSOC 2016 Application update
by Serge Stinckwich Feb. 18, 2016

Feb. 18, 2016

Dear all, just a quick update to GSOC application of Pharo this year - We have enough topics I guess. I already send a reminder on the various mailing-list. List of topics here: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-project-proposals/blob/master/Topics… We have to generate the html from the topics list and put the result on the gsoc.pharo,org website. I ask Uko to have a look to this, but I don't want to loose to much time on this. I was wondering if we should transform the list as a Markdown document on github just to keep it simple. - Finish the 2016 Application and Organization profile on Google website. The questions are a little bit different from 2015 and we should complete them. Please find below the answers to the questions right now. I add in parenthesis, the number of words of each answers and the maximum allowed. Please us to refine our answers. We need to wrote "guidance for students". Thank you. ========================================================================== Why does your org want to participate in Google Summer of Code? (898/1000) Supporting open-source projects is one of the most important objectives of the Pharo community. Participating at GSoC will increase the visibility of Pharo project efforts, thus favoring interactions with other communities. We are also interested in providing interesting projects to students allowing them to learn and have a fun job for the summer. We expect also to bring more people into our community. That's very interesting as the Pharo community is trying to be innovation-driven and more open minded than the Smalltalk community from which we have evolved. We want people from other communities to join ours and we are also interested in what is happening outside and to share experiences or ideas. Fortunately for us, dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, among others, enjoy increasing popularity. This is an excellent opportunity to join, show and learn from and with other communities. ========================================================================== How many potential mentors have agreed to mentor this year? 11-15 ========================================================================== How will you keep mentors engaged with their students? (668/1000) We chose mentors from people who are long time in our community and have proven to be reliable. Usually we try to match mentors with projects that are important for themselves. This means that the mentor has an own interest in the project that the student doing it. Also we try to ensure that there is a co-mentor for every project who can replace the main mentor if needed. Also it is very important for us to keep a good record and expand the community, and in previous years we even managed to organize our own "summer code" programs for a couple of students, so in the worst case we will find a replacement from the core part of the community, or the board itself. ========================================================================== How will you help your students stay on schedule to complete their projects? (886/1000) As mentioned before we've already organized our own small "summer code" programs, as usually we have more interested students than the fundings that we can spend for them. However we acknowledge that maintaining student's motivation is very important. We are a very open and friendly community, and we encourage the students to take part on the mailing list discussions from the beginning of their projects. There is a specific pharo-users mailing-list more suitable for beginners than the pharo-dev mailing-list. Usually students get feedback and requests from the beginning of their projects, and they have people interested in the prototypes as soon as they are ready. From our experience having real users for the project serves as the best motivation. Also our mentors try to maintain a constructive and friendly discussion to ensure that the student enjoys working on the project. ========================================================================== How will you get your students involved in your community during GSoC? (608/1000) As mentioned above we encourage students to announce their status on the mailing list as well as discuss questions on our Slack channel. We also encourage them to write blogs about their project experience to both promote themselves and give others an opportunity to familiarize with the project more and share ideas between students. We are organizing PharoDays every year (this year in Belgium, website: http://pharodays2016.pharo.org) and we participate to the ESUG (European Smalltalk User Group) conference in the end of each summer and plan to invite the students of the best projects to present there. ========================================================================== Has your org been accepted as a mentoring org in Google Summer of Code before? Yes ========================================================================== Which years did your org participate in GSoC? - 2012 - 2010 - 2008 - 2007 ========================================================================== What is your success/fail rate per year? - 2012: 10 projects pass / 3 fail - 2010: 6 projects pass / 0 fail - 2008: 5 projects pass / 0 fail - 2007: 5 projects pass / 0 fail ========================================================================== If your org has applied for GSoC before but not been accepted, select the years: - 2015 - 2014 - 2013 ========================================================================== What year was your project started? 2008 ========================================================================== Short description of Pharo (166/180) Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language and IDE. We innovate every part of the development experience to come up with the best way to work with software. ========================================================================== Long description of Pharo (1401/2000) Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming languagea and IDE. Pharo's goal is to minify the gap between the state of your mind and the functionality of your application. Whether you are writing code, debugging it, inspecting an object, hacking the runtime or tweaking the IDE there should be nothing that stops you from engaging the action with ease and grace. We work both on improving Pharo itself and on developing end user applications in Pharo. Below you will see the highlights of most prominent Pharo features. ### Simple & powerful language No constructors, no types declaration, no interfaces, no primitive types. Yet a powerful and elegant language with a full syntax fitting in one postcard! Pharo is objects and messages all the way down. ### Feel a live environment Feel the joy of having immediate feedback at any moment of your development: Developing, testing, debugging. Even in production environments, you will never be stuck in compiling and deploying steps again! ### Amazing debugging experience The Pharo environment includes a debugger unlike anything you've seen before. It allows you to step through code, restart the execution of methods, create methods on the fly, and much more! ### Pharo is yours Pharo is made by an incredible community, with more than 80 contributors for the last revision of the platform and hundreds of people contributing constantly with frameworks and libraries. ========================================================================== Guidance for students on how to apply to your organization. Should include any prerequisites or requirements. You may wish to include a template or tips for their proposals. (0/1500) TBD ========================================================================== - Regards, -- Serge Stinckwich UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC) Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk http://www.doesnotunderstand.org/

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Writing a dictionary as XML?
by phil＠highoctane.be Feb. 18, 2016

Feb. 18, 2016

How can I write a dictionary (OrderPreservingDictionary) as an XML string? XMLWriter is more like a step by step thing. TIA Phil

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[ANN] OSUnix and OSLinuxUbuntu on new UFFI
by Torsten Bergmann Feb. 18, 2016

Feb. 18, 2016

These two projects (who were based on NativeBoost in Pharo 4) are now updated to new UFFI in Pharo 5 which means they are loadable in recent Pharo 5 image and all tests pass. So if you are working on Linux/Unix you might wan to check them out in latest Pharo 5 by loading them from Catalog browser. A BIG THANKS to Esteban for helping me in the conversion and updating the new Unified FFI (UFFI) according to the issues that were found during the conversion. More is in the pipe ... step by step it goes! Bye T.

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rollToArity: ?
by Alexandre Bergel Feb. 18, 2016

Feb. 18, 2016

Esteban, What Object>>rollToArity: is supposed to do? It belongs to UnifiedFFI Cheers, Alexandre -- _,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;: Alexandre Bergel http://www.bergel.eu ^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;.

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Fwd: [squeak-dev] New Cog VMs available as per VMMaker.oscog-eem.1679/r3602
by John Pfersich Feb. 18, 2016

Feb. 18, 2016

FYI. I noticed that Eliot didn't send to Pharo-users. Sent from my iPad Begin forwarded message: > From: Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda(a)gmail.com> > Date: February 15, 2016 at 11:39:29 PST > To: Squeak Virtual Machine Development Discussion <vm-dev(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org> > Cc: "newspeaklanguage(a)googlegroups.com" <newspeaklanguage(a)googlegroups.com>, Discusses Development of Pharo <pharo-dev(a)lists.pharo.org>, The general-purpose Squeak developers list <squeak-dev(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org> > Subject: [squeak-dev] New Cog VMs available as per VMMaker.oscog-eem.1679/r3602 > Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list <squeak-dev(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org> > > Hi All, > > first of all, apologies for the long wait for new VMs. I know there are bugs that these VMs address and that it's been 5 months since VMs were last made is something I regret. The wait was due to my developing the 64-bit Spur Cog JIT VM which required surgery not just to the Cogit but also to Slang. I beg your forgiveness. > > Secondly, the Mac VMs are much changed, using John McIntosh's Cocoa support libraries. The old Carbon UI VMs are history. That means that Cog supports building on contemporary Mac OS releases. These VMs were built on 10.9; I like the 3D look much more than the 10.10 one ;-). The VMs are also signed, so installing them should be easier. > > Thirdly, these VMs include 64-bit JIT support. There is an updated squeak trunk image at http://www.mirandabanda.org/files/Cog/SpurImages for you to try. As yet the 64-bit Vms do not include an FFI plugin. I hope to rectify this soon. > > Finally I have included Pharo Mac VMs, not to displace the official Pharo VMs, but to test my build process. I hope that in very few months the svn repository will be moed to githup and that Esteban and I will build official VMs from the same repository. > > > > The VMs are here: http://www.mirandabanda.org/files/Cog/VM/VM.r3602 > > CogVM binaries as per VMMaker.oscog-eem.1679/r3602 > > Include 64-bit Spur VMs for Mac OS X x64 and Linux x64. N.B. As yet these VMs > lack FFI support. > > Move all Mac OS X VMs to the Cocoa libraries. Minimum supported version should > be 10.6.x. The Mac OS X VMs are signed and so should install properly without > having to disable the launch security checks. > > > Bug Fixes and Improvements: > > General: > Add vmParameter 20 to answer the utc microseconds at startup. > > > CoInterpreter: > Remove the atCache from the CoInterpreter. It's of little benefit given the > Cogit. > > ceSend: et al need to add looked up methods to the method cache, otherwise > methods only found through machine code sends will not be jitted. > > Fix slip in maybeSelectorOfMethod: which will improve back traces > including methods containing pragmas (including primitives). > > Modify secret primtiive 161, primitiveSetIdentityHash so that with 0 args it > answers whether an object has an identity hash. This is vacuously true for V3, > but is meaningful in Spur. > > > Cogit: > Fix /horrible/ bug with primitive error codes and fixups. The adjustment of the > initialPC to skip the primitive and error code, if any, was done after > generating fixups for backward branches, and hence these branches were bogus. > Object>>shallowCopy in Spur is subject to this, but amazingly enough it has not > surfaced before now. Fix this by adjusting the initialPC before scanMethod > scans for fixups. > > Fix bug in Spur machine-code at:put: on 32-bit bits objects; method failed to > fail for negative values. > > Fill unused portions of methods with the stop instruction, not nop. > > Explicitly initialize the code zone with stops. Explicitly clear the > reclaimed portion of the method zone after a compaction. > > Include the reclaimed portion of the method zone in the I-cache flush > after a compaction: no point in leaving it in cache since it isn't a > valid call/jump target. > > > Spur: > Maintain the survivor count on scavenge. > > Fix start up of images containing >= 16 segments. The old code assumed > numSegments < 16 and failed to grow the segment records, resulting in objects > in segments greater than 15 to not be swizzled, and a resulting crash. > > Spur Cogit: Support CompiledMethod indexing in genPrimitiveAt[Put]. Hence fix > the regression in at:[put:] whereby in Spur one could access the literals part > of a method as bytes. > Add a machine-code primitive for objectAt: to provide fast literal and header > access on Spur. > > Add 16-bit indexability to Spur. Generate slimmer code for > positive32BitValueOf: on 64-bit Spur. > > Fix a bug with out-of-place two-way become, which got the hash copy the wrong > way round. By default, the hash stays with the reference in two-way become. > > Fix what appears to be a compiler bug with in-place two-way-become by treating > the headers to be swapped so that remembered flags are swapped and hash bits > are swapped if required. This fixes a bug with in-place two-way become of > objects that are the same size on the heap. One object's contents would not > be updated correctly. > > Implement ephemeron queue primitive. Add an image flag that controls the > finalization support (StackInterpreter instVar newFinalization). If unset, > finalization is as currently expected; WeakArray finalizes all WeakArrays in > its registries on each finalization (which does not scale!). If set, then both > fired ephemerons and bereaved weak arrays are added to the finalization queue > and the finalization semaphore is signalled. In this regime the image is > expected to send mourn to each element of the queue, and weak arrays will send > themselves finalize in mourn, side-stepping the finalizeValues steps and > rendering WeakArray's FinalizationDependents and WeakRegistry obsolete. > The bit is set via > Smalltalk vmParameterAt: 48 > put: ((Smalltalk vmParameterAt: 48) bitOr: 64). > > > Slang: > Fix bad regression in type inference from VMMaker.oscog-eem.1587. > returnTypeForSend:in: can only default return types to sqInt for unknown > selectors. The rewrite in VMMaker.oscog-eem.1587 inadvertently defaulted the > return type of known methods whose return type was yet to be determined to > sqInt. The fix is to only default to sqInt if there is no known method for the > given selector. This fixes, for instance, the weird flipping of the type of > 32-bit Spur's headerWhileForwardingOf:,which should always be #sqLong. > > Fix bad bug in type inferrence. Avoid computing variable and return types > prematurely i.e. don't derive types from as-yet-untyped methods. > > Fix baaaad bug in node:typeCompatibleWith:inliningInto:in: which was looking > up the type of the formal parameter in inlining in the target method, not the > method being inlined! > > > Newspeak: > Fix bug in MNU for cogged dynamic super sends - should start looking for > #doesNotUnderstand: in the superclass not the receiver class. Unify MNU > lookup between absent and present receiver sends as a result. > > Further fix outer send MNU by not confusing lkupClass and lkupClassTag. > Push setting lkupClassTag down to clarify it is for new cache entries. > > > Plugins: > Fix the FilePlugin's unnecessary fullGC on Spur. > Include the file sync prim in the FilePrims plugin. > > ThreadedFFIPlugin: > - ExternalAddress now are taken correctly (nor as ByteArray or Alien, because > they are different beasts). > - allow pushing of pointers to any type (into a ByteArray, an ExternalAddress > or an Alien), to allow passing parameters style int*, float*, etc. > - allow reading in memory to allow read chunks of ByteArray > > Added ThreadedFFIPlugin>>#primitiveLoadSymbolFromModule (copy and adapt from > IA32ABIPlugin). > > Fix coercion problems on FFI plugin (IA32 & ARM) > - character were not correctly mapped back > - floats were not being well checked > - external addressed needs to be treated as aliens for the purpose of coercing > them as pointers (bad regression by Eliot) > > Alien Plugins: > Fix missing primitive failure for Alien typeAt: 0 [put:]. > Add word accessors to Alien. > > _,,,^..^,,,_ > best, Eliot >

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