- Pharo-vm - lists.pharo.org

Pharo Mailinglist moved to new setup: pharo-vm@lists.pharo.org
by Marcus Denker July 30, 2026

July 30, 2026

We have moved the Pharo Mailinglists to a new setup. WARNING: We sadly could not migrate the settings for the subscribers (e.g. Digest) Please sign up at http://lists.pharo.org/accounts/signup to create an account to configure the lists as you need them. 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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Fwd: IWST deadline extension
by Guillermo Polito March 28, 2025

March 28, 2025

Apologies for multiple receptions! > DÃ©but du message rÃ©expÃ©diÃ© : > > De: Guillermo Polito <guillermopolito(a)gmail.com> > Objet: IWST deadline extension > Date: 28 mars 2025 Ã 5:08:37â¯PM UTC+1 > Ã: Gordana Rakic via Esug-list <esug-list(a)lists.esug.org> > > Dear all, > > due to several requests, we have extended the submission deadlines for the call for presentations. > Please check the info below: > > -------- > > IWST is the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies. The goal of the workshop is to create a forum around contributions and experiences in building or using technologies related to Smalltalk. While the maturity of presented ideas and results is not crucial, their presentation is expected to trigger discussion and exchange of ideas. The topics of your paper can be on all aspects of Smalltalk, theoretical as well as practical. Authors are invited to submit research articles or industrial papers. > > https://esug.org/2025-Conference/IWST2025.html > > This year we will again have two different tracks: > > Two-Round Paper Submission. As in the previous year, submission will be in two rounds: > Extended abstracts are submitted to present at the conference > Later, full/short papers are submitted for proceedings publications > > Presenting Previously Published Works. We also invite authors of contributions related to IWST's topics, accepted for publication in Journals and Proceedings of top-rated international conferences within the previous 2 years, to submit an abstract and present their published results to the IWST workshop collocated with ESUG. Authors will be invited to present their paper after checking that the submission meets the above criteria. Having the submissions already reviewed and accepted by the peers, they will not be reviewed again for technical content. > Important Dates > > Extended abstract submission deadline: April 7th, 2025 > Already Published Papers Abstract submission deadline: April 7th, 2025 > Extended abstract notification deadline: April 14th, 2025 AoE > > Already Published Papers Abstract notifications: April 14th, 2025 AoE > Full/short paper submission deadline: May 19th, 2025 AoE > > Workshop: July 1-4, 2025 > > Best regards, > IWST team

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New VM Release v10.3.3
by Guillermo Polito Jan. 20, 2025

Jan. 20, 2025

Hi all, Weâve published a new VM release (v10.3.3) to be used with Pharo versions 10 through 13. 10.3.3 includes all changes in 10.3.2 (that was rolled back) plus several improvements. Highlights: - improves the naming schema of built artifacts to differentiate releases from intermediate/nightly builds - is built on the old file server (that we recovered!) to support compatibility with older GLibC versions - builds and run properly on newer linux systems (we fixed a couple of linking and compilation issues with newer versions of gcc) - many improvements in the perm space Please find in the wiki information about the build and versions https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/wiki Full release changes log https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/releases/tag/v10.3.3 Finally, a big thanks to MaxLeske and Norbert for testing, and to everybody who contributed even in the previous conversations. Cheers, G

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New VM Release v10.3.2
by Guille Polito Dec. 11, 2024

Dec. 11, 2024

Hi all, Weâve published a new VM release (v10.3.2) to be used with Pharo versions 10 through 13. Please check the change log here: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/releases/tag/v10.3.2 The build is on the oven, new VMs should be available as soon as the build farm finishes. Cheers, G

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IWST Deadline Extension
by Guille Polito May 17, 2024

May 17, 2024

Dear Community, Please let us inform you that the submission deadline for the full/short papers has been extended until May 31st, 2024 AoE. Let us remind you of the submission details: - Short position papers (5 to 10 pages) describing fresh ideas and early results. - Full papers (more than 10 pages) with deeper descriptions of experiments and research results. Please also consider that you may submit another work other than your original abstract. Paper accepted for publishing will be published within a *CEUR-WS Proceedings>https://ceur-ws.org/*. Hence, both submissions and final papers must be prepared using the *CEUR ART style>https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-XXX/CEURART.zip*. We recommend using the template in single-column style, although you may use two columns. CEUR proceedings accept papers in both styles as soon as they follow the template and have 5 or more pages. The IWST team, Gordana, Guille, and Steven https://esug.org/2024-Conference/IWST2024.html

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IWST Paper Submission Deadline is Approaching!
by Guillermo Polito May 10, 2024

May 10, 2024

Dear community, IWST invites everybody to submit full/short papers to be considered to be plublished in the IWST 2024 Proceedings. Papers can both be presented in the conference's IWST track and appear in proceedings independently of the initially submitted abstracts. Full/short paper submission deadline: May 19th, 2024 We are looking for papers of two kinds: - Short position papers (5 to 10 pages) describing fresh ideas and early results. - Full papers (more than 10 pages) with deeper description of experiments and of research results. Paper accepted for publishing will be published within a *CEUR-WS Proceedings>https://ceur-ws.org/*. Hence, both submissions and final papers must be prepared using the *CEUR ART style>https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-XXX/CEURART.zip*. We recommend to use the template in single column style, although you may use two colums. CEUR proceedings accepts papers in boths styles as soon as they follow the template and have 5 or more pages. The IWST team, Gordana, Guille and Steven https://esug.org/2024-Conference/IWST2024.html

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Stack overflow support?
by Guillermo Polito Nov. 15, 2023

Nov. 15, 2023

Hi all, We started (with many interruptions over the last months) working a bit with Stephane on understanding what is the (positive and negative) impact of stack-overflow support in Pharo. The key idea is that if a process consumes too much stack (potentially because of an infinite recursion) then the process should stop with an exception. ## Why we want better stack consumption control This idea comes up to solve issues that are pretty common and hit especially newbies. For example, imagine you accidentally write an accessor such as ``` A >> foo ^ self foo ``` Students do this all the time, and Iâve also seen it in experienced people who go too fast :). More importantly, such recursions could happen also with not-so-obvious indirect recursions (a sends b, b sends c, c sends a), and these could hit anybody. This is aggravated because the current execution model allows us to have infinite stacks âmeaning: limited by available memory only. This is indeed a nice feature for many use cases but it has its own drawbacks when one of these kind of recursions are hit: - code just loops forever taking space in the stack - when there is no more stack space, context objects are created and moved to the heap - but those contexts are strongly held, so they are never GCed and take up extra space - even worse! they are there adding more work to the GC every time and making the GC run more often looking for space that is not there ## Why Ctrl-dot does not always work Of course, super users know there is this âCtrl dotâ hidden feature that should help you recover from this. First, let's take out of the equation that this is only known by super users. Now, in this situation, when Ctrl-dot is hit it will trigger a handler that suspends the problematic process and opens a debugger on it. But it could happen that, - the stack is so big that the debugger is very sluggish (best-case scenario) - the VM is just flooded doing GCs so maybe the Ctrl dot event does not even arrive at Pharo or the trigger - if the recursion is hit when printing an object (which is more common than you could imagine), opening the debugger could trigger a new recursion and never give back the control to the user ## What are we working on The main idea here is: Can we have a simple and efficient way to prevent such kinds of situations? After many discussions around detecting recursion, we kinda arrived at the simple solution of just detecting a stack overflow. The solution is easy to understand (because itâs like other languages work) and easy to implement because there is already support for that. But this leaves open two questions: - what happens when people want to use the âinfinite stackâ feature? - when should a process stack overflow? What is a sensitive default value? Our draft implementation here https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/710 <https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/710> does the following to cope with this: - we can now parametrize the size of the stack (of each stack page to be more accurate) when the VM starts up - the stack overflow check can be disabled per process We also are running experiments to see what could be a sensitive stack size for our normal usages. Here, for example, we ran almost all test cases in Pharo separately (one suite per line below), and we observed how many tests broke (x-axis) with different stack sizes (y-axis). Here we see that most test suites require at least 20-24k to run properly, some go up to 36k of stack before converging (i.e., the number of broken tests does not change). Youâll notice in the graph that There are some scenarios that break all the time. This is because exception handling itself is recursive and may produce more stack overflows depending on the size of the stack between the exception and the exception handler. So some more work is still required, mostly changing Pharo libraries to properly support this. For example: - should tests run in a fresh process with a fresh stack? - should the exception mechanism use less recursion? - resumable exceptions add stack pressure because they do not âunstackâ until the exception is finally handled, meaning that the stack used by exception handling just adds up to the stack of the original code, can we do better here? Probably there are more interesting questions here, thatâs the âwhy" behind this email. Iâm interested in opinions and scenarios you may come up with that should be taken into account. Cheers, Guille

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VM Release 10.0.8
by Guillermo Polito Oct. 23, 2023

Oct. 23, 2023

Hi all, TL;DR; update your launcher VMs and your download scripts! There is a new VM version: release 10.0.8 which fixes, among others, a performance regression that showed in some cases that overly relied on the interpreter. See below the changes log, and for those interested, the fix for the performance issue is here: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/705 <https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/705> What's Changed Fixes #14768: File class>>primFileAttributesð· answers corrupted result by @akgrant43 <https://github.com/akgrant43> in #697 <https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/697> Fix/speed regression by @tesonep <https://github.com/tesonep> in #705 <https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/705> Full Changelog: v10.0.7...v10.0.8 <https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/compare/v10.0.7...v10.0.8>

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VM Release 10.0.6 on the pipe
by Guillermo Polito Aug. 11, 2023

Aug. 11, 2023

Hi all, This email is to tell you that there is a new VM release on the CI pipe, with many fixes and improvements. This release will be available for versions of Pharo 11 and above. Improvements in build environment * Update build environment for Pharo 10 vm branch by @guillep in https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/594 * Make tests run in parallel by @guillep in https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/596 * Update Jenkins to use Pharo 110 for building by @PalumboN in https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/661 Cleanups * Cleanups/externalize internalize by @guillep in https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/583 * Fix/warnings by @guillep in https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/584 * fixing-categorization in P10 by @tesonep in https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/625 Fixes * Fix mnuMethodOrNilFor: for method wrappers by @guillep in https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/578 * fix function signatures by @pavel-krivanek in https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/582 Debugging improvements * Gdbinit file and helpers v2 by @guillep in https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/486 * VM Debugger improvement with IR by @QDucasse in https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/342 VM Improvements * improving-permSpace by @tesonep in https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/614 * Changing the order of command-line processing and PList in OSX by @tesonep in https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/609 * Adding parsing of image parameters from PList by @tesonep in https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/636 * Change terminate handler to exit with 128+signal by @jvalteren in https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/644 * Improvements in parameters handling in OSX by @tesonep in https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/639 * Adding check to fix when the image is open with an older VM by @tesonep in https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/642 * Fix/ephemeron list by @guillep in https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/668 New Contributors * @jvalteren made their first contribution in https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/pull/644 **Full Changelog**: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/compare/v10.0.5...v10.0.6 <https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/compare/v10.0.5...v10.0.6> Cheers, Guille et al

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[Looking for Participants] Experiment on Reflection
by Guillermo Polito March 30, 2023

March 30, 2023

Hello everyone, Iona Thomas is running an experiment on the usage of reflection, studying the usage of reflection by different libraries in Pharo. Our ultimate objective is to understand how to (re)design the reflective layer of Pharo. We are looking for participants for an experiment. The experiment is open to anyone as it is intended to have different levels of experience with Pharo - Duration : ~1h30. - When? During April (see link below). - Where? We will have a set of presential sessions for those that be in Lille, and we are also organising remote sessions. It will help us a lot to organize if you can select possible dates so we can organise the experiment: https://framadate.org/wMiDsJkoHt64ECh8 Please, use your public email as name so we can contact you back. We hope you will help us change the reflective world! Best regards, Iona et al

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