Pharo Newsletter May 2016

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.

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Pharo Monthly Newsletter April 2016

The Pharo Community is busy preparing the release of Pharo5 for May. We got so busy that we forgot to send out a newsletter for March…

For this April Newsletter, we have three topics:

1. The Pharo MOOC
2.  Pharo Consortium: Membership Matching Campaign
3. Pharo Days Report

To get Pharo related news every day, follow us on twitter @pharoproject.

Pharo MOOC
The Pharo MOOC is a new online course about Live Object Programming in Pharo.

• More information and registration http://mooc.pharo.org.
• The Teaser-trailer is online: http://dai.ly/x3qedvo

The MOOC starts with over 2000 registrations on May 2nd. Register today!

Membership Matching Campaign
The Pharo Board is proud to announce a special campaign for attracting new Consortium Members during 2016.
A new fund has been created from which the Consortium will receive the equivalent of one yearly membership fee for every new member, and the increment in yearly fees for every upgrading member. For example, if a new company joins the Consortium as a Silver member (2000 EUR / year), the fund will contribute a one-time amount of 2000 EUR to the Consortium. Similarly, if a company upgrades from Bronze (1000 EUR / year) to Gold (4000 EUR / year), the fund will contribute a one-time amount of 3000 EUR.

This campaign will take place until the end of 2016, or until the fund is depleted. Currently, the fund totals 21000 EUR, a sum which is graciously supported by three companies: LabWare, Object Profile and Fenk.
http://pharo.org/news/membership-matching-campaign

Pharo Days
Pharo days were organised on Thursday March 31 & Friday April 1 in Namur (Belgium). It was a great moment to encounter other Pharo programmers, to feel community spirit, to discuss about the Pharo ecosystem and the improvment of the language, listen many interesting talks about various themas.

The schedule was interesting: We were lucky to listen talks about Seaside 3.2, data formats and protocols, Unified FFI, Bloc, Spur, etc. If you didn’t go to Namur, all the slides will be available on this website soon.

Many photographies and a video are already available on the web:

• Photos: https://goo.gl/photos/orgTn4C1bSeqf6fy5
• Video: https://youtu.be/eHKtxgbuLSg

Thanks to the event organizers for their incredible work. The Pharo Days took place in a beautiful place (Le cercle de Wallonie).

Monthly Newsletter Feb 2016

Pharo Monthly Newsletter Feb 2016

We will start our monthly email to keep you in touch with the Pharo world. You receive this mail because you subscribed at some point at http://pharo.org In case of a mistake: there is link at the end of the mail to unsubscribe.Many things are happening as usual, far too many to list in one email. The plan is to send one mail per month, never more, with just a selection of all the things happening. (This one is late, it was for Feb 2016… there will therefore be one more end of March) If you are interested in all the news, there are blogs and twitter accounts to follow. For example: Blog: Everything you wanted to know about Phro without being forced to read 1000 mails https://pharoweekly.wordpress.com Our twitter account @pharoproject For a complete list, see http://pharo.org/blogs Pharo 50 beta is getting well on track. We expect to have a release in Mid-April. We now have:  Spur the new memory manager developed by Eliot Miranda.Spur includes new GC, new object representation, support for ephemerons, pinned objects and a lot more.  new uFFI compatible with latest Spur memory manager. new version of GT toolkit tools. … and many great enhancements (break point, browser improvements,…) To play with Pharo5, the latest development snapshot is available at http://pharo.org/download PharoDays 2016: Two days at Namur to talk and exchange ideas about Pharo, see http://pharodays2016.pharo.org More manpower: Pavel Krivanek, the creator of the Pharo mini image shrink, has joined on a one-year position to work on the bootsrap and other projects. The Pharo consortium is growing, we are preparing an announcement for later this month. http://consortium.pharo.org