Section: Software and Platforms

Pharo

Participants : Marcus Denker [correspondant] , Damien Cassou, Stéphane Ducasse, Esteban Lorenzano, Damien Pollet, Igor Stasenko, Camillo Bruni, Camille Teruel, Clément Bera.

Web: http://www.pharo.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 applications.

The first stable version, Pharo 1.0, was released in 2010. The development of Pharo accelerated in 2011 and 2012: Versions 1.2 to 1.4 have been released (with more than 2400 closed issues). In 2013, Pharo 2.0 was released. The development cycle will now be one major release per year, with Pharo3 to be released in March 2014.

In 2012, RMoD organized the first Pharo Conference during two days in May with 60 participants, the second Pharo conference was held in Bern, Switzerland in 2013.

Additionally, in November 2012 RMoD launched the Pharo Consortium (http://consortium.pharo.org/ ) and the Pharo Association (http://association.pharo.org ). Over 10 companies are now paying members of the Consortium.

RMoD is the main maintainer and coordinator of Pharo.

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 Smalltalk implementations.

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

• (EM4) Evolution and Maintenance: 4 – Active user group, consortium and association had just been 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