Section: Software

Pharo

Participants : Stéphane Ducasse, Marcus Denker [correspondant] , Damien Pollet, Mariano Martinez-Peck, Veronica Uquillas-Gomez, Igor Stasenko.

Web: http://www.pharo-project.org/

The platform. Pharo is a new open-source Smalltalk-inspired language and environment. It provides a platform for innovative development both in industry and research. By providing a stable and small core system, excellent developer tools, and maintained releases, Pharo's goal is to be a platform to build and deploy mission critical Smalltalk applications.

The first stable version, Pharo 1.0, was released in 2010. The development of Pharo accelerated in 2011: Version 1.2 and 1.3 have been released, the development branch (1.4a) has seen already over 230 incremental releases as of mid November 2011. For 1.2 and 1.3, over 1000 bug tracker issues have been resolved. In 2011, the community organized five Pharo Sprints, RMoD organized the Deep into Smalltalk School in March 2011.

RMoD is the main maintainer and coordinator of Pharo. It is used widely in both research and industry. With Inria, RMoD is in the process of setting up a Pharo Consortium. There are 25 companies interested in supporting the consortium.

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

• (A5) Audience: 5 – Used in many universities for teaching, more than 25 companies.

• (SO3) Software originality : 3 – Pharo offers a classical basis for some aspects (UI). It includes new frameworks and concepts compared to other implementations Smalltalk.

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

• (EM4) Evolution and Maintenance: 4 – Active user group, consortium is being set up.

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

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