Category Archives: data structures

The other day we were working on the compiler detection of hotspots, originally implemented by Clément Béra during his PhD thesis. In Sista, hotspot detection is implemented as a countdown that looks like the following: the counter is loaded in a register, decremented and then a jump if carry detects if the substraction underflowed. WeContinue reading “Debugging the JIT compiler Hotspot detection for ARM64”

One of the improvements that we are including in Pharo 9 is the update of the build process in OpenBuildService. This service allows us to produce packages for different distributions of Linux. These pacakges are built using the versions loaded in the distribution and they can be installed and updated using the tools present inContinue reading “Installing Pharo in Linux using the System Package Manager”

For a couple of years now, Pharo includes support for Ephemerons, originally introduced with the Spur memory manager written by Eliot Miranda. For the upcoming Pharo 9.0 release, we have stressed the implementation (with several hundred thousands Ephemerons), make it compatible with latest changes done in the old space compaction algorithm, and made it aContinue reading “A Taste of Ephemerons”

Did you ever want to get the value of an expression each time you navigate the debugger stack? This is what we will show in this tutorial: you’ll learn how to implement a new extension for the StDebugger in Pharo9.0: the ‘Expression Evaluator StDebugger Extension’ (or simply EvaluatorDebugger for short) – that allows the evaluationContinue reading “Debugger Extensions in Pharo 9.0”

This post is now out-dated. The current version is available in Pharo Zero-Conf, and in the future in the Pharo Launcher. Check https://get.pharo.org/ After receiving the new Apple Mini with the M1 processor, we are producing the first version of the Pharo VM. This version, is a base version that lacks JIT optimizations and requiresContinue reading “First Apple M1 Pharo Version”

If you have a Windows ARM64 machine such as the Surface Pro X, chances are you may want to debug native ARM64 applications with it. However, as of today 2/12/2020, Windows does not support local debugging of ARM64 applications, but only remote debugging. Moreover, CMake projects cannot be configured to use remote debugging, or IContinue reading “Debugging CMake project on Windows ARM64 with Visual Studio”

From time to time it happens that a bug is accidentally introduced and we realize it several versions later. If the cause of the bug is not clear, one good strategy is to find the piece of code change that introduced the bug, and engineer a test and fix from that change. If we haveContinue reading “Bisecting Pharo versions to find regressions”

This is a brief post on how to load the sound package, enable it and play some sound samples in Pharo 9.0. For Pharo 9.0, we fixed the sound support by refactoring and using SDL2 for enqueuing the playback of sound samples. The current version only supports sound playback, but it does not support yetContinue reading “How to play Sound in Pharo”

This is the fourth entry of the series about implementing full-text search indexes in Pharo. All started with the first entry Implementing Indexes – A Simple Index, where we present the need for having indexes in large images. Then, we have the second entry is Implementing Indexes – Who uses all my memory, where we analysed theContinue reading “Implementing Indexes – Replacing the Dictionary”