When working with Smalltalk, you may wish to access functionality that exists in a specific library or technology that you do not want to recreate. In such cases, you have two options: creating an FFI bridge or extending the Smalltalk VM with new primitives. In this article, we’ll explore the less common method of extending the Pharo Virtual Machine with an external plugin by creating a HelloWorldPlugin. The goal is to provide insight and clarity into the process of extending the VM in this manner, and to explain the steps involved in Pharo 9 as of February 2023.

Today, I’m excited to announce a new release of PharoDawnTheme, this dark warm color theme for the Pharo Smalltalk IDE. This theme is available for Pharo 9 and 10

Just a quick update to mention that I’ve merged in develop a pull request that will add the capability to work with Mapless using UnQLite in memory. The use case is mostly for single-image caching. When you want to cache data but keep the image lean, that’s when you can use this setup.

After quite some time not having updates on Mapless, I’ve started to invest some efforts in getting it working for latests Pharo versions and incorporating and maturing its API and main features.

When I was using Smalltalk in a daily basis I had the chance to understand quite well the things that would make productivity go high. Here are some sketches I’ve done. I didn’t do the debugger and the package manager system, and both of them have great impact on this but hopefully you can imagine how productive this could be.

I was doing a bit of housekeeping in my MacBook Pro so I can use some additional diskspace. The starting point was to do a scan with OmniDiskSweeper. OmniDiskSweeper’s User Interface allows you to easily navigate the directories that are occupying space the most so you can investigate what in those big directories is actually useful and what can be archived.

This is a really common need that AngularJS is not providing out of the box. I needed it myself for some projects and you might too? Ok, even if many will tell you that you should not program in a way that needs to use this feature, I beleive that there is plenty of people that knows exactly what they are doing. There is plenty of cases that have real and justified reasons to use this feature and they can use it properly. In short, when adequate this do not necessarily implies bad design. So here we go.

Sometimes you need to control how a worker image starts and stops right from the operative system. You may do it from the terminal but the really important use for this comes with automation and orchestration. In airflowing, the Pharo worker images start and stop automatically and on command from the OS and in other to shutdown, the images use the technique I’m describing here. To do this you need 3 things: ...

There are many things we can do to have an Amber Smalltalk IDE that makes the difference in terms of developing experience and productivity. The best ones take a lot of effort that is currently unfunded. Maybe we should start a Kickstart campaign and change that. But in the meantime why not do smaller steps in the right direction? We could do small incremental improvements with what we already have. ...

Using an Announcer can give you a lot of flexibility for making your Amber components interact loosely coupled. And while developing, it is normal to rename a class. Today I was working with a product and I had this announcement class with a typo OrdedProductEditRejected which I’ve renamed to OrderedProductEditRejected. None of the current Amber IDE’s have a refactoring tool to help you to rename globally and changing the methods that are using the class, so you have to go old school and rename in every place yourself.