I just thought it might be interesting to give a small update on the progress that Aaron (or Claude) has made getting an iOS Pharo working. Itâs frankly damn amazing that feedback Iâve sent over to him is forwarded to Claude and a new build pops out sometimes minutes later. Itâs still being tweaked but man it runs on my iPhone and IPad quite well (from my limited usage so far). Hats off to Aaron to pushing on this, it might have a deep impact on how efficiently this community can generate radical improvements. On Wed, 25 Feb 2026, at 1:19 PM, Aaron Wohl via Pharo-users wrote:
Pharo 13 for iPad in the test Apple Store (open in the Apple TestFlight app); Phone or Mac https://testflight.apple.com/join/kGmPQFr9 Due to Appleâs no JIT, it's not snappy. But maybe it's still useful? Source https://github.com/avwohl/iospharo about 100K lines of new source code.
This is my first venture into using Pharo. I could use advice on where this project fits in Pharo/Smalltalk land. In the early 80s, I used the Xerox Parc Alto at Carnegie Mellon to run Smalltalk. I got laid off, went on a cruise, sat down in a beach chair with LEARN PHARO and an iPad. But, no Pharo for iPad. So I did the natural thing and told Claude Code to port Pharo to iPad. 54 days and 1347 commits later, out popped a usable iPad app. I do have a background in compilers, working on the Production Quality Compiler project at CMU in the early 1980s, mostly on lexers. But I didnât write any code for this. I mostly told CLAUDE a few times a day stop doing workarounds, do what the real VM does, and thatâs a workaround. CLAUDE would never have succeeded I think if I hadnât started insisting a focus on getting the test suite to pass rather than the app to work.
The main snag using the real VM was encoding the encoding of type info in the high bits of pointers for immediate types. It seemed simple to me to shift the type info to the low 3 bits. But Claude could not get the real VM to stop looking in the high bits; perhaps I should have pushed harder on that. But I had always heard how easy it was to port Smalltalk, so I just went with a new VM with the type info in the low bits. Loading a standard image translates the addresses. The other issue was that Apple forbids JIT on iPad. So this new VM has no JIT. Issues: - Should this be a separate VM? Should I push harder on getting the standard VM to work with type info in the low bits and no JIT? Even if that would be better, is it worth the bother now that this works?
- I donât want to suck up the PharoSmalltalk name in the Apple stores if it causes offense. I can call it VibeTalk or something to leave the name free for a hand-coded version. Or move off the name if a real contender ever shows.
- Without JIT, is it too slow to bother releasing? Is there some other optimization that could bridge the gap if it is too slow?
- Are there any users who can give the iPad version a really good workout in real work? The VM passes the test suite. But it just started working on the iPad today. There will be UI issues.
- On the iphone the menu bar is cut off, and the welcome window is mostly off the screen. The menu bar layout is in the image, not the VM. I am not sure the VM should work around it. Should these be fixed in the image to have a multi-line menu bar as needed, and reshape initial window layouts on phones? If so is anyone willing to do the Smalltalk side or help me do it (I have written mostly other languages)
