Reinout,
The profiling tools are exposed through MessageTally.
http://onsmalltalk.com/com/profiling-smalltalk
should get you started.
Please note that Pharo is not even yet in beta, so some of the snags you
mention will no doubt get fixed as the feature list finalizes. As an open
source project, there will be a certain amount of bias toward what is important
to the heavy contributors. I hope those will include organizations such as
yours to push Pharo in the direction of a stable performance-oriented
environment on top of which a mix of commercial and academic projects will
flourish.
Re slow updates, I am not sure what to expect, but Pharo's response times in
general are of concern to me, and there are efforts getting under way to find
out what is wrong (PackageInfo has been marked as a suspect a couple of times),
what is realistic, and what can be done about it.
Bill
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Reinout Heeck
Sent: Sunday, July 05, 2009 6:36 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Pharo-project] Loads of Pharo development process questions
I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how the Pharo development/
maintenance process is supposed to work.
Most of these seem to be missing info on the wiki which merely need fleshing
out there, I would update the wiki pages myself if only I knew what to write...
Please bear in mind that I'm a newbie to Squeak, so some of these questions may
be rather naive.
One of my motivations is to evaluate the future viability of Pharo as a vehicle
for commercial applications and whether it warrants to lobby for resources
being allocated to its development.
So here goes:
The wiki mentions 'kernel' and 'MiniImage' as not being in scope of Pharo.
What does that entail, does this mean that discussions about allowing nil in
Sets are out of scope?
What is the status of the dev-image? As delivered the tools are broken (because
context menus on the source pane raise an UHE that is induced by
OB-Enhancements, issue 904), is it actively used by the main committers or is
the core image the place to be?
Even more confusingly the above issue has been marked as fixed this night but
if I do a World->System->Software Update the bug persists in my image.
When I looked into fixing it myself I got confused (because I looked at
InstallScript.st), it seems the code comes from various repositories -- not a
single Pharo respository/branch. Are these various repositories Pharo-specific
and maintained over Pharo-Inbox or do I need to submit fixes to different
places?
I guess as a Squeak newbie I need a high-level overview on the wiki on how code
and fixes flow within Pharo, towards Squeak and towards the various tool
maintainers (and back to Pharo of course, the upstream/ downstream story). What
is the story when such tools and Pharo become incompatible and need to fork (or
are they already forked)?
Is there a vision on long-term support?
Pharo wants to be agile and be free to change at will (IMO a good
decision) but if it is to be viable at my job there need to be versions that
receive long-term support (the 'professional' aspect of Pharo).
At least bug fixes (and hopefully speed enhancements) need to be ported back to
an 'LTS' release for quite a while (I'm thinking three to four years here) and
on a consistent/reliable basis if Pharo is to be viable for the kind of
projects I work on. Porting our projects (and project specific tool
enhancements) forwards turns out to be very expensive (even in a 'conservative'
environment like VisualWorks) so a mechanism needs to be in place to avoid
needing too many porting moments over the lifetime of our projects (think 10+
years).
The process of updating the dev image is excruciatingly slow, is this normal?
The process seems to be CPU bound and takes ages for what I consider a small
amount of changes - in its current state it would be unusable for the process
we use at work, it will need to be brought back to well under a minute as
opposed to the twenty (or so) minutes it took me yesterday. What is the
background and vision for the future on this issue?
Let me finish with a quick and easy newbie question:
where do I find the profiler tools for Pharo?
Thanks!
Reinout
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