my 2c... There are arguments for and against any of the semantics decisions, so leaving those aside for greater minds...
+1 GemStone Pharo and GemStone have long been an enviable workflow for “complex problems". They go together in a project, each providing a necessary part of the puzzle. Pharo and VW more often play in the same space, not exactly competitors, but typically the choice of one OR the other for any particular project. Disclaimer - as much as I love VW, I work with GemStone almost every day and can attest that every little divergence between Pharo and GemStone adds a non-trivial burden to the project and team. GS also considers Pharo as a “reference” platform. You mentioned James’ amazing work running a Pharo image on GemStone. They have adopted the Pharo FileSystem, and the latest version has a first-step implementation of traits. Some of the Smalltalk community projects lost to Pharo through traits will get a new lease on life! However, it’s fair to expect that having been in isolation for so long, there will be semantic “gotchas” to find. Would be nice if they could be minimised as part of Pharos' semantic policy. The closer Pharo & GemStone work together, the easier it will be to achieve awesome end-to-end smalltalk projects, and by extension, make the world a better place :) > On 3 Feb 2025, at 4:35 AM, stephane ducasse <stephane.duca...@inria.fr> wrote: > > Hello people > > In Pharo (following Squeak tradition) a string is equals to its symbol > representation. > e.g. > ’tintin’ = #tintin > > true > > In other Smalltalk dialects this is not the case. > > We have been working (sponsored by Lifeware) to support both semantics (yes > this is a kind of > daunting task and it can raise bugs). > > Our objective is to help people make business with Pharo. So “simple” cross > compatibility is something that we consider e.g. to deploy applications in > Gemstone for example. > (We would love to have a Pharo compiler working on Gemstone generating > Gemstone VM bytecodes this is why we love the work of James Foster but this > is another story). > > So since we are pragmatic people we could be convinced that the semantics of > Pharo is not good :) > and that by default we should use the semantics of GS or VW. > > The first step is to be able to choose which one to use within Pharo and be > able to switch. > We are nearly there for Pharo 13. > > The second step is to get a nice default. > And we need the help of the community for this. > > Do you have any advice, arguments for and against any of the two choices that > could be put on the table to influence our decisions for Pharo 14. > > So let us know :) > > Stef on the behalf of the Pharo consortium. > > > > Stéphane Ducasse > http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr > 06 30 93 66 73 > > "If you knew today was your last day on earth, what would you do differently? > ....ESPECIALLY if, by doing something different, today might not be your last > day on earth.” Calvin & Hobbes
