> On 14 Dec 2015, at 11:24, Esteban Lorenzano <esteba...@gmail.com> wrote: > > We will start migration to Spur today. > To complete it, we will require some time, specially to adapt the CI and > check everything is ok. > > Spur will allow us to do a big step forward in Pharo development, in the > concrete you will see it immediately for this: > - We have noticed a speed increment of 100% in tiny benchmarks (and according > to Eliot, it will be at least 35% in general on the system). > - No more GC stops (noticeable when running large systems) > - We will be able to scale our systems up to 2G memory consumption without > loosing performance. > > But, this will have some drawbacks in the first times: > > 1) VM will not be compatible between versions anymore: Pharo 5.0 will have a > Pharo Spur VM associated (and they are not compatible). > - There WILL NOT be a "non-spur" version of Pharo 5.0. Once completed > the transitions, this will be the only one. > > 2) NativeBoost-FFI implementation has been replaced with a new implementation > who relies in ThreadedFFIPlugin and IA32Plugin. While we worked a lot to do > this transition as painless as possible and we achieve a good level of > backward compatibility (most uses of #nbCall: should work out of the box), > there are some problems we cannot solve: > - there are some stuff not possible to compatibilise, notably: > - Structures now need to inherit from FFIExternalStructure > - Arrays now are now shadowed > - in general is a bit slower (impossible to compete with ASM) but in > general is not perceptible. > - THERE WILL BE BUGS AND NON-IMPLEMENTED FEATURES: Current > implementation is validated with Athens and even Roassal was working, but of > course that does not covers all cases. > 2.1) ASMJIT will be removed from system and put in a separated packages. > NOTE: There will be a blog post explaining FFI-NB architecture during the > week. > > 3) There are more or less 70 new failing tests, some of them important than > we need to fix as soon as possible. Please, please, please, help us with them > :) > > 4) In general we foresee the system will became unstable some weeks, before > it gets back to normal. Please be patient. > > 5) You will need to adapt your Pharo 5.0 related apps and CI processes (to > take care about new VM). Some programs will stop work at all (for example, I > think Pharo-launcher will need to be adapted). >
ah, I forget it! 6) Some changes to the VM accumulated during the time of transition (some months now). So, some changes introduced there will not be present in new VM. I will merge this changes in the next weeks. cheers! Esteban
