[ann] Lam Research evaluates Pharo

Hi,

We are very happy to make the following announcement:


Lam Research, a leading supplier of wafer fabrication equipment and services to the global semiconductor industry, is an experienced user of the Smalltalk programming language. Smalltalk is a key component in Lam's software control system for a broad range of the equipment it manufactures. Tudor Girba is a leading member of the tools and environment development effort in Pharo, having architected the Glamorous Toolkit for live programming. Eliot Miranda is author of the Cog virtual machine that underlies Pharo and other Smalltalk dialects.

Lam has engaged Tudor and Eliot to explore potential enhancements in Lam's use of Smalltalk. These enhancements range from running highly optimized Smalltalk on low cost, single board computers, to enhancing Lam's Smalltalk development practices with state-of-the-art live programming. During the engagement, Tudor and Eliot successfully moved a key communication component of the control system to Pharo. It was a challenging task aimed at extending the reach of Lam’s system to the Pharo world including the option of executing on ARM processors.


Cheers,
Tudor Girba, Eliot Miranda and Chris Thorgrimsson

Excellent!!!!

Keep going guys! You are impacting state of the art of software engineering!

Alexandre


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Alexandre Bergel  http://www.bergel.eu
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On Thu, Aug 25, 2016 at 4:50 PM, Tudor Girba <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We are very happy to make the following announcement:
>
>
> Lam Research, a leading supplier of wafer fabrication equipment and services to the global semiconductor industry, is an experienced user of the Smalltalk programming language. Smalltalk is a key component in Lam's software control system for a broad range of the equipment it manufactures. Tudor Girba is a leading member of the tools and environment development effort in Pharo, having architected the Glamorous Toolkit for live programming. Eliot Miranda is author of the Cog virtual machine that underlies Pharo and other Smalltalk dialects.
>
> Lam has engaged Tudor and Eliot to explore potential enhancements in Lam's use of Smalltalk. These enhancements range from running
> highly optimized Smalltalk on low cost, single board computers
to enhancing Lam's Smalltalk development practices with
state-of-the-art live programming. During the engagement, Tudor and
Eliot successfully moved a key communication component of the control
system to Pharo. It was a challenging task aimed at extending the
reach of Lam’s system to the Pharo world including the option of
executing on ARM processors.
>
> Cheers,
> Tudor Girba, Eliot Miranda and Chris Thorgrimsson

Great to hear of this - particularly since I guess some(much?) of it
was dealing with proprietary systems.  I'll understand if you can't
answer the following questions in detail. I'm interested in:
* what model was the single board computers? Or what were its
specs/price?  Or how much of your experience might carry over to a
board like the BeagleBone Black, particularly wrt to embedded control
via it Programmable Real-time Unit.
* did the communication component involve a proprietary protocol?  Or
one of the industry standard "process automation" protocols listed
here[1] ?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automation_protocols

cheers -ben

Hi Ben,

Raspberry Pi 2.

> Or what were its
> specs/price?  Or how much of your experience might carry over to a
> board like the BeagleBone Black, particularly wrt to embedded control
> via it Programmable Real-time Unit.

I see no reason why it would t carry across without change.

> * did the communication component involve a proprietary protocol?  Or
> one of the industry standard "process automation" protocols listed
> here[1] ?

The protocol is proprietary, but there are other equivalent open protocols in the Smalltalk space.  See eg Seamless and Denis Kudriasov's protocol used with it for his remote debugger work.

>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automation_protocols
>
> cheers -ben
>