The yearly European Smalltalk User Group conference happened last week in Lyon, France.
Unofficial numbers tells it had more than 80 participants, and we had met with lots of people we hadn’t seen for years!
We are slowly recovering from COVID 🙂
Of course, you can find the full conference info and schedule in here: https://esug.github.io/2023-Conference/agenda/agenda.html.
However, the goal of this post is to be short and give some highlights on the Pharo activity @ESUG, to keep you updated and steer some discussions.
The Slides of all talks are already in the ESUG Archive, videos will be online soon. I’ll update this post when that happens!
Besides the typical news around Pharo, the announcement of Pharo11 release (from earlier this year), we have seen lot of work on tooling, AI, Databases, web frameworks, infrastructure, and people using Pharo to build different kind of (maybe even crazy in some cases) applications.
Infrastructure
Pharo 11 has improvements in the bytecode compiler, block closure optimizations, Ephemeron support.
Git integration has been stable and working during years, and we keep you updated with the latest libgit releases.
Packaging Pharo desktop applications is being improved a lot.
This even opens the door to build fancy desktop applications using the new versions of Bloc and Roassal!
Profiling and tooling
Pharo has seen in the last year lots improvements in the debugger infrastructure and the refactoring engine.
There is also interesting advances in program instrumentation, used for example to build memory consumption profilers.
There is also a fuzzing framework under development to perform automatic detection of bugs!
AI and BioInformatics
Pharo keeps moving in the AI front with performance improvements, library extensions and bindings to external libraries!
Lapack integration, better dataframes, fancy algorithms and numerical libraries.
All these power toolkits like Bio Smalltalk, which has lots of tools to do exploratory analysis on DNA and other biological analyses.
Imagine all these with the power of live debugging and interactive visualizations!
Databases
Besides the fancy and stable gemstone object databases that can iteract with Pharo, new things are appearing in this area.
Soil is a new object database written in Pharo, with fresh views on old concepts.
It’s even being used in production and apparently we can build sexy query systems on top!
Web Frameworks
The Pharo community keeps delivering high quality frameworks to help you build web applications.
Pharo JS has been updated for the latest Pharo and latest ECMA.
Also, the guys from Yesplan have integrated the Hotwire framework from Ruby-on-Rails into Seaside!
Applications in Pharo!
Of course, not only Pharo is changing, but it also allows people to do amazing applications with it.
We have seen amazing demos of custom desktop applications by the people from Thales, native UIs and command line tools by the people from SCHMIDT, super fun simulators using Cormas.
Also a big heads up for the amazing Glamourous toolkit built on top of Pharo that announced its v1.0 release during the conf!
Community and fun stuff
We had also slots to discuss about the Google Summer of Code results with Pharo, where students did an amazing job on the Pharo IDE, Roassal, the charting libraries, the virtual machine…
Also, we had some interesting and fun community input on the current IDE thanks to the YesPlan people that run a survey and presented the results.
Domenico (Lucrezio), the crazy DJ that makes live coding music, showed his work on synthetizing music from Pharo, now with integrated visualizations!
Finally, there was an announcement on a new MOOC on Advanced Object-Oriented Design.
Conclusion
Of course, there were also lots of nice projects presented in the show us your projects, in the technology awards, in the research workshop.
Put on top the coffee break discussions, the social events, and the nights out!
ESUG’23 was a success, and it was lots of fun.
Let’s hope ESUG’24 will be as fun as this one too!
See you around!
Guille
The Pharo Dev: Mastering Objects 