On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 4:15 PM Johan Fabry <jfabry@dcc.uchile.cl> wrote:

Excellent work, thanks a lot !!

> On Dec 14, 2015, at 07:24, Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> We will start migration to Spur today.
> To complete it, we will require some time, specially to adapt the CI and check everything is ok.
>
> Spur will allow us to do a big step forward in Pharo development, in the concrete you will see it immediately for this:
> - We have noticed a speed increment of 100% in tiny benchmarks (and according to Eliot, it will be at least 35% in general on the system).
> - No more GC stops (noticeable when running large systems)
> - We will be able to scale our systems up to 2G memory consumption without loosing performance.
>
> But, this will have some drawbacks in the first times:
>
> 1) VM will not be compatible between versions anymore: Pharo 5.0 will have a Pharo Spur VM associated (and they are not compatible).
>�� - There WILL NOT be a "non-spur" version of Pharo 5.0. Once completed the transitions, this will be the only one.
>
> 2) NativeBoost-FFI implementation has been replaced with a new implementation who relies in ThreadedFFIPlugin and IA32Plugin. While we worked a lot to do this transition as painless as possible and we achieve a good level of backward compatibility (most uses of #nbCall: should work out of the box), there are some problems we cannot solve:
>�� - there are some stuff not possible to compatibilise, notably:
>�� - Structures now need to inherit from FFIExternalStructure
>�� - Arrays now are now shadowed
>�� - in general is a bit slower (impossible to compete with ASM) but in general is not perceptible.
>�� - THERE WILL BE BUGS AND NON-IMPLEMENTED FEATURES: Current implementation is validated with Athens and even Roassal was working, but of course that does not covers all cases.
> 2.1) ASMJIT will be removed from system and put in a separated packages.
> NOTE: There will be a blog post explaining FFI-NB architecture during the week.
>
> 3) There are more or less 70 new failing tests, some of them important than we need to fix as soon as possible. Please, please, please, help us with them :)
>
> 4) In general we foresee the system will became unstable some weeks, before it gets back to normal. Please be patient.
>
> 5) You will need to adapt your Pharo 5.0 related apps and CI processes (to take care about new VM). Some programs will stop work at all (for example, I think Pharo-launcher will need to be adapted).
>
>
>

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Johan Fabry�� -�� http://pleiad.cl/~jfabry
PLEIAD and RyCh labs�� -�� Computer Science Department (DCC)�� -�� University of Chile