Developer Pharo community | Implementation language Smalltalk | |
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First appeared 2008; 9 years ago (2008) Stable release 5.0 / May 12, 2016; 10 months ago (2016-05-12) OS Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, others License MIT license, partially Apache License 2.0 | ||
Pharo is an open source implementation of the programming language and environment Smalltalk. Pharo offers strong live programming features such as immediate object manipulation, live update, and hot recompilation. The live programming environment is at the heart of the system.
Contents
Introduction
Pharos is a Greek word (Φάρος) which means lighthouse. The Pharo logo shows a drawing of a lighthouse inside the final letter O of the name.
History
Pharo emerged as a fork of Squeak, an open source Smalltalk environment created by the Smalltalk-80 team (Dan Ingalls and Alan Kay). It focuses on modern software engineering and development techniques. Pharo is supported by the Pharo consortium (for companies) and the Pharo association (for users).
Companies and consultants
Some companies use Pharo for their development projects. In particular, they use:
The Pharo consortium was recently created for companies wishing to support the Pharo project. The Pharo association was recently created for users wishing to support the project.
Performance and virtual machine (VM)
Pharo relies on a virtual machine that is written almost entirely in Smalltalk itself. Beginning in 2008, a new virtual machine (Cog) for Squeak, Pharo and Newspeak has been developed that has a level of performance close to the fastest Smalltalk virtual machine. In 2014/2015 the VM community is working on Spur, a new Memory Manager for Cog that should again increase performance and provide better 64-bit VM support.