Section: Software and Platforms

Fuel

Participants : Martin Dias [Correspondant] , Mariano Martinez-Peck.

Web: http://rmod.lille.inria.fr/web/pier/software/fuel

Objects in a running environment are constantly being born, mutating their status and dying in the volatile memory of the system. The goal of serializers is to store and load objects either in the original environment or in another one. Fuel is a general-purpose serializer based on four principles: (1) speed, through a compact binary format and a pickling algorithm which obtains the best performance on materialization; (2) good object-oriented design, without any special help from the virtual machine; (3) specialized for Pharo, so that core objects (such as contexts, block closures and classes) can be serialized too; (4) flexible about how to serialize each object, so that objects are serialized differently depending on the context.

Since Pharo 2.0, Fuel is part of the standard distribution.

Here is the self-assessment of the team effort following the grid given at http://www.inria.fr/institut/organisation/instances/commission-d-evaluation .

• (A4) Audience: 4 – Large audience software, usable by people inside and outside the field with a clear and strong dissemination, validation, and support action plan.

• (SO3) Software originality : 3.

• (SM4) Software Maturity: 4 – Bug tracker, continuous integration, large test suites are on place.

• (EM4) Evolution and Maintenance: 4.

• (SDL4) Software Distribution and Licensing: 4 – Fuel is licensed under MIT.

• (OC5) Own Contribution: (Design/Architecture) DA-5, (Coding/Debugging) CD-5, (Maintenance/Support) MS-5, (Team/Project Management) TPM-5