The latest version of Pharo, the open-source Smalltalk-inspired language and core library, has been released, with what the developers describe as a massive system cleanup that has gained speed, removed dead code, and removed old or deprecated frameworks including Glamour, GTTools, and Spec1.

Pharo is strongly object-oriented and everything in the Pharo language is an object. The language is dynamically typed; inheritance is simple; memory management is automatic via a garbage collector and its syntax is very simple and small. There's an enthusiastic collection of developers using Pharo, and the developers make regular commits and provide almost daily bug fixes. The language has a number of ways to interface with C, and there are Java and JavaScript libraries.

The environment enhancements are partially due to the move to Spec 2, which is a major release. Spec is a framework in Pharo for describing user interfaces, and the new version means that all layouts are now dynamic, and support more presenters - Pharo's term for the base “presenting” UI mechanism. The move to Spec 2 has also enabled the developers to clean up Pharo's APIs, and to remove the tools that were written in Spec 1 and that have now been rewritten in Spec 2. The Glamour and GTTools have been removed, as they were no longer maintained and their functionality has been incorporated into Spec 2.

Other tools that were created using the deprecated frameworks and have been rewritten include the Dependency Analyser, Critique Browser, and many other small utilities.

The developers say that "modularisation has made a leap", and that this has resulted in the creation of project descriptions for many internal systems.

Support has been removed for the old Bytecode sets, and embedded blocks have simplified the compiler and language core. This has reduced the image size by 10 percent.

The VM has also been improved, and offers better async I/O support, socket handling, and FFI ABI.

Pharo 10 is available now. 

More Information

Pharo Website

Related Articles

Pharo 7 Focuses On IoT

Pharo 6.0 Moves To 64-Bit

Pharo MOOC on FUN

Squeak 5.0 Released

Racket 6.2 Released

Pharo 3.0 Released 

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info