The big news of the month of course is that Pharo50 has been released! This is our most significant release yet. Here are some highlights:
- The PharoVM is now based on Spur, the new memory management, and it brings with it a 35% speedup!
- A new unified foreign function interface (UFFI) replaced.
- …overall all 2400 issue tracker entries closed.
You can read the official announcement here:
http://pharo.org/news/pharo-5.0-released
Pharo Mooc
The Pharo Mooc saw a constant increase of participants with 2700 participants from more than 90 countries. It is entering its fourth week. More information
Pharo 6
With the stable release out, we have started a new development branch. As always, we slowed integrating changes while stabilizing the release, so this new development branch is seeing lots of changes that were held back.
As always, we do not ignore simple (even trivial) changes and have seen already many improvements related to typos, comments, cleanups… as well as some big-ticket items. One example here is support for immutable objects.
64bit Pharo: A Preview
The 64bit version of Pharo was able to run the whole image this week! Here is a screenshot:
Sysmocom: Free Software for Mobile Communication
Sysmocom is a leading provider of Free Software Mobile Communication solutions. In 2012 we have started a long term project to develop a complete ASN1, TCAP, MAP, CAP, GSM stack using the Pharo Object Environment. We have decided to use Pharo because of the increased productivity, the great tooling, the live inspection and if necessary modification of a running system to deploy a critical bugfix. Pharo has allowed us to focus on what is important.
The stack was used to uncover security and privacy issues inherent to the MAP protocol design in 2014/2015. We have used the stack to build a carrier-grade AuthenticationCenter (AuC) and helped a customer to move their production traffic off a proprietary system to ours. We look forward to move a HomeLocationRegister (HLR) into production this year.
Holger Freyther CEO. http://www.sysmocom.de
See http://www.pharo.org/success for more success stories.