Congrats! Nice to see the commitment and evolution. :) KR Graham McLeod Owner/Chief Architect “Building Desirable Futures”
 Training • Consulting • Tools • Research [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> https://www.inspired.org <https://www.inspired.org/>. landline: +27 21 531 5404 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamatinspired/ > On 29 Jul 2026, at 18:07, Norbert Hartl via Pharo-dev > <[email protected]> wrote: > > We are happy to announce the availability of Soil version 5. > > What is new? > > Automatic change tracking: Soil now computes a recursive content hash for > objects and uses it to detect modifications automatically. This removes the > need for the explicit markDirty: calls that were previously required — > something we called out as a goal back in the v4 announcement. > Read-only transactions have been hardened: we now distinguish a transaction > that is intentionally read-only from one that just happens to end up with no > changes, and read-only transactions abort automatically instead of committing > a no-op. > Indexed collections (SoilPersistentDictionary and indexed dictionaries) can > now be used as non-root objects, not just at the root of the database. > A first working garbage collector has landed — a preview, not a finished > feature: Soil>>garbageCollect compacts object segments offline by cloning and > atomically swapping them in. There's also a new opt-in Soil>>checkConsistency > you can run separately without slowing down the GC itself. The data-layer > primitives for a future online/segment-based GC are also in place, though not > yet wired up. > A new SoilCommitError hierarchy lets you catch any commit-time failure with > one exception class instead of several unrelated ones. > A good number of crash and silent-data-corruption fixes, notably around the > graph exporter/importer, backup version history, and depth-first traversal. > Full changelog: > https://github.com/ApptiveGrid/Soil/blob/main/docs/versions/changelog-v5.md > > I also wrote up the release on the blog, with a bit more context: > https://norbert.hartl.name/blog/2026-07-29_soil-v5-released.html > > What is planned next? > > Integrating the Windows support work that's already sitting there > Process-specific variables > A preview of an online GC, building on the primitives that landed in v5 > Multi-index collections and partial indexes (carried over from v4's plan) > Hope you like it. Give it a spin and then tell us! > > Norbert & Marcus > > _______________________________________________ > Pharo-dev mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
