This week (47/2020) on the Issue Tracker

Pharo8
======
HOT-FIX: Support GitHub Personal Access Tokens. This was already merged in
Pharo9 before.

- Merge Iceberg v1.6.10 in Pharo 8 #7732
                        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7732


First class Variables
================

Work continues: some small improvements (e.g. primitve error variables) and cleanups

- MetaLinks-Cleanup-Variables2 #7742
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7742

- Variables defined with #primitive:error: are shown as undefined, fixes 7748 #7749
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7749
       
- Cleanup-SystemDictionary-varlookup #7746
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7746
       
- 7731-OCUndeclaredVariableWarning-isUninitialized-with-NonInteractiveUIManager #7745
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7745

- DoItVariable instead of ForeignVariable and tests #7710
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7710
       

ReadOnly Literals
==============

Some cleanups... all literals added as literals
are read only, no special code needed anymore.

- Compiler-compile-all-Literals-readOnly #7631
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7631

- #isReadOnlyLiteral is not needed anymore #7767
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7767

- 7740-CI-32bit-testIsImmediateObject #7744
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7744


Graphics
========

- Add support for creating OpenGL ES contexts #7750
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7750
       
- Disable the dpi based computation screen scale factor computation in OS X #7747
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7747


Small Improvements
==================

- 7755 re excessive arguments rule should exclude ffi callouts
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7757
       
- ReLiteralArrayContainsCommaRule should ignore all UFFI selectors #7754
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7754


Fixes
=====
- Allow catalog json to be served from GitHub and other #7738
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7738

- Duplicate API from Behavior to RGBehavior. #7743
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7743
       
               
Cleanups
=========
And lots of small cleanups. As always, these are not important
in itself as single items. But over time, taking them all together, they do matter.

- Move ReAsClassRule to GeneralRules #7759
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7759
       
- 5457-environmentKeyNotFound-looks-deadcode #7773
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7773
       
- ObjectsAsMethodsTest-move-to-Kernel-Tests #7762
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7762

- Typo #7766
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7766
       
- DeadCode-Cleanup-Finder #7734
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7734
       
- FFICompilerPlugin-Simpler #7726
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7726
       
- Small cleanup on ReMissingSuperSendsRule #7761
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7761
       
- Typo in RGBehaviorDefinition>>#soleInstance #7752
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7752
       
- Another cleanup pass on DoubleLinkedList package #7736
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7736
       
- Cleanup System-Support-Tests #7729
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7729
       
- BaseStreamTest had just one subclass. Move the tests there and remove… #7739
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7739
       
- NautilusRefactoring-DeadcodeClean #7723
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7723
       
- Introduce package Collections-Sequenceable-Tests #7719
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7719

- Move-isHaltNode-to-AST #7765
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7765

Question: are these mails interesting? Do they have enough information added to
have value?

Marcus Denker-4 wrote
> Question: are these mails interesting? Do they have enough information
> added to
> have value?

Yes! Please continue. I like that they are brief because too much detail can
be overwhelming and we can always ask questions about items that seem
interesting. IHMO the only extra info worth adding (if there's ever the
time) is the "why" - motivation and summaries of internal discussions that
we wouldn't understand just by looking at the commits...



-----
Cheers,
Sean
--
Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Developers-f1294837.html

Marcus Denker-4 wrote

> Question: are these mails interesting? Do they have enough information

> added to

> have value?

Yes! Please continue. I like that they are brief because too much detail can

be overwhelming and we can always ask questions about items that seem

interesting. IHMO the only extra info worth adding (if there's ever the

time) is the "why" - motivation and summaries of internal discussions that

we wouldn't understand just by looking at the commits...

-----

Cheers,

Sean

--

Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Developers-f1294837.html

> On 21 Nov 2020, at 10:14, Noury Bouraqadi <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Indeed, posting these emails is useful. It helps keeping us posted about the ongoing progress of Pharo.
>
> I like they are grouped by topic, so it makes easier to get what it's about. Sean's suggestion would indeed understand more. Though I expect it will require more time/effort to write. Moreover, these emails are already long. I'm affraid they'll become way too long.
>
> A solution that mixes both might be posting more often updates. But, again I expect it to be time consuming.
>

Yes, writing for real takes effort…

E.g. last week I did a trivial PR after I got annoyed about seeing too many ivars tat are not used and did a first step (mostly a skipped test):

Cleanup-Unused-Ivars #7780
        https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/7780


But then I realised that the core of the test:

        variables := Smalltalk globals allBehaviors flatCollect: [ :each | each instanceVariables ].
        variables := variables reject: [ :each | each isReferenced ].
        variables := variables collect: [ :each | each definingClass ] as: Set.


actually is more interesting then being just a trivial test for a trivial cleanup… In the end it is trivial, but it is as an example for why
things like turning variables into objects is interesting:


=======

As you might be aware, we added to Pharo the concept of “Firsts class Variables” that is, there is a meta object for every variable in the system.

Historically, even though you might think that “everything is an Object” in Smalltalk, the memory constraints that existed when ST80 was created did not make reifying everything possible. Even today, this has to be done with care: for example, instances of TempVariable are only created on demand in Pharo.

As for ST80: Instance Variables are one example of things that are not Objects: The only thing that we have are the names (that is, strings) of the instance variables defined by a class. The order is fixed so that the offset of the variables in the list of all instance variable of the class hierarchy actually is the offset that the bytecode uses to access this variable.

Thus all code dealing with Variables tend to be formulated quite “low level”. It exposes a lot of implementation details: you need to find names, then the offset, then use a low level bytecode scanning method to check if a method accesses this offset.

So how do “First Class” Variables improve the situation? Let’s see what we have to do to find all classes that define an instance variable that is not accessed.

Read more: https://blog.marcusdenker.de/finding-unused-variables-an-example-for-first-class-variables