[ANN] Pharo 5.0 released!

Dear World,

The time has come for Pharo 5.0!

This is our most significant release yet. Here are some highlights:

- The PharoVM is now based on Spur, the new memory management, and it brings with it a 35% speedup!

- A new unified foreign function interface (UFFI) replaced NativeBoost to provide a strong Spur-compatible framework for interfacing with the outside world.

- The Glamorous Toolkit now includes the GTDebugger to offer a moldable infrastructure that allows the developer to customize the debugger deeply.

- The underlying Reflectivity mechanism has reached maturity with multiple pieces coming together to empower developers to instrument their own systems. For example, we now have breakpoints implemented as just a simple extension of this mechanism.

- QualityAssistant is now part of the image to provide live feedback during development.

These are just the more prominent highlights, but the details are just as important. We have closed 2446 issues in Pharo 5. Take a moment to go through a more detailed recount of the progress: https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-changelogs/blob/master/Pharo50ChangeLogs.md.

While the technical improvements are significant, just think of getting 30% faster out-of-the-box, still the most impressive fact is that the new code that got in the main Pharo 5.0 image was contributed by 100 people. Together we have touched 43% of the classes, and 20% of the methods. The following visualization rendered with Roassal in Pharo 5.0 is dedicated to this effort. The picture shows the touched classes and packages in gray, the authors and the links to the changed classes in red, and,  using an automatically generated visual id, you can spot authors that have worked on similar projects.

Pharo is more than code. It is an exciting project involving energetic people. We thank all the contributors of this release:

Abdelghani Alidra,  Clara Allende,  David Allouche,  Nicolas Anquetil,  Thibault Arloing,  Jean Baptiste Arnaud,  Mangesh Bendre,  Clement Bera,  Alexandre Bergel,  Torsten Bergmann,  Usman Bhatti,  Vincent Blondeau,  Johan Brichau,  Camillo Bruni,  Miguel Campusano, Damien Cassou,  Nicolas Cellier,  Danny Chan,  Andrei Chis,  Christopher Coat,  Ben Coman,  Bernardo Contreras,  Gabriel Omar Cotelli,  Tommaso Dal Sasso,  Paul De Bruicker,  Sean De Nigris,  Christophe Demarey,  Simon Denier,  Marcus Denker,  Martin Dias,  John Dougan,  Stephane Ducasse,  Stephan Eggermont,  Johan Fabry,  Sergio Fedi,  Cyril Ferlicot,  Holger Hans Peter Freyther,  Joshua Gargus,  Tudor Girba,  Thierry Goubier,  Kris Gybels,  Norbert Hartl,  Thomas Heniart,  Dale Henrichs,  Nicolai Hess,  Alejandro Infante,  Henrik Johansen, Goran Krampe,  Pavel Krivanek,  Juraj Kubelka,  Denis Kudriashov,  Matthieu Lacaton, Laurent Laffont,  Kevin Lanvin,  Jannik Laval,  Alexander Lazarević, Skip Lentz,  Max Leske,  Dave Lewis, Esteban Lorenzano,  Sheridan Mahoney,  Mariano Martinez Peck, Max Mattone,  John McIntosh,  Rene Meusel,  Eliot Miranda,  Henrik Nergaard,  Marion Noirbent,  Merwan Ouddane,  Nick Papoulias,  Nicolas Passerini,  Alain Plantec,  Guillermo Polito,  Damien Pollet,  Baptiste Quide,  Andreas Raab (RIP),  Alain Rastoul,  Stefan Reichhart,  Lukas Renggli,  Mark Rizun,  Michael Rueger,  Valentin Ryckewaert,  Ronie Salgado,  Udo Schneider,  Boris Spasojevic,  Igor Stasenko,  Roger Stebler,  Serge Stinckwich,  Aliaksei Syrel,  Camille Teruel,  Pablo Tesone,  Yuriy Tymchuk,  Peter Uhnak,  Masashi Umezawa,  Dion Stewart, Sven Van Caekenberghe,  Jan Van De Sandt,  Benjamin Van Ryseghem,  Toon Verwaest,  Franck Warlouzet.

(If you contributed with Pharo 5.0 development in any way and we missed your name, please send us a mail and we will add you).

Enjoy!

The Pharo Team