In my previous article, How to Create a Pharo Smalltalk Plugin, I outlined how to create a Pharo Smalltalk plugin. However, since then, I’ve discovered a more convenient way to produce these plugins using the PharoPluginBuilder and StarterPlugin. In this post, I wanted to inform and describe the idea of this simplified process of creating a Pharo Smalltalk plugin.
I’m excited to announce that the Pharo Consortium has been approved as an organizer for Google Summer of Code 2023! As a mentor for the Pharo TensorFlow plugin project, I’m thrilled to be a part of this program and to help developers to work on a project for the Pharo community.
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.