My last email on VM topics...

Hi esteban

Just for the record, our team spent a lot of engineering time and
money on Pharo.
May be I forgot some people. Often we bent research projects to
squeese in Pharo activities.

- Pavel 1 year paid for bootstrap and general improvements
- Denis 2 years paid for TelePharo (for research projects)
- Igor 4 years paid for athens, SDL, VM Build, TxText
- Christophe 5 years bootstrap, ci, infras, plauncher, cargo
- Clement two years as young engineer on compiler/VM
- Clement 6 months on Sista

- Camillo 3 years for his Phd
- Guille 3 years for his Phd
- Pablo 3 years for his Phd
- Mariano 3 years for his Phd
- Clement 3 years for thisPhd

- Guille two years on various improvements
- Me several years
- Marcus several years
- Damien on side project
- Esteban 4 years by Inria

- Nicolas Passerini got paid by the consortium 9 months
- Guillermo paid 6 months for database
- you and mariano got paid for side projects for a couple of months

Right now only Esteban is paid by the consortium because this what the
consortium
can pay!

If I sum up Inria put a lot of money on the table compared to the
users and people
benefitting from Pharo. But this is like that.

So I think that the consortium is a positive thing. Some people may
think the contrary.
Now do not expect miracles. A single guy cannot do much.
Retrospectively I think that
I made a mistake pushing to have tools for git. We should have go the
filetree way
and command line and gain 18 months of work. But I cannot be right all
the time.

Now if all the companies doing Pharo would put money on the table then
we could have
another full time engineer working to improve the situation. I hope
that this will happen.

Then about the VM: a VM is a complex piece of engineering.
And in the open-source community people apparently like to put in addition
not good process and extra constraints (super compatibility, different
dialects), not good communication,
So we end up with a not good situation.

Now I will not read and send any emails about the VM in the future. I
have a set a filter to
automatically trash any emails on the topic. So if you send me an
email and you see now reaction it is normal.
I think that we make no progress and we are even on regression on this part.

We will talk with the consortium members and asked them what is the priority
and if the VM is one of them, then we will have to take real decisions
to make progress.
Now since we cannot form someone on VM core rapidly we will see what are the
options. But to me what is clear is that the situation cannot continue
to be like that.
We cannot not control our process.

Stef


On Sun, Apr 1, 2018 at 6:02 PM, Esteban A. Maringolo
<emaring...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Stef,
>
> I encourage you to disclose as much details as possible.
>
> For "bystanders" as myself, it is, a Pharo _user_ that always thinks
> of Pharo as the first option but
> doesn't contribute to the core of it,  all this discussions only add
> noise and concerns about the
> stability of the whole Pharo ecosystem.
>
> I've always had  the impression that Pharo is heavily dependent on
> INRIA's/government institutions,
> which in the end depend on political decisions instead of
> "market/profit" objectives.
> With the support of members of the Consortium I thought this had changed, but
> reading your statements it seems it is not enough.
>
> It is known you don't have the best temper, but it is also known you
> strive to get the best for Pharo,
> so if you're also aware of that you can avoid restraining yourself,
> and say what you have
> in mind trying to not make personal accusations.
>
> I'd prefer a brutal and noisy truth instead of false quiet calm.
>
> I hope this helps.
>
> Regards,
>
> Esteban A. Maringolo
>
>
> 2018-04-01 10:16 GMT-03:00 Stephane Ducasse <stepharo.s...@gmail.com>:
>> I will not reply publicly to this email because I think that it will get 
>> worse.
>> So I will not talk publicly about anything related to the Pharo VM in
>> the Pharo mailing-list and any other lists.
>> I will put a filter and trash emails automatically. Like that I will
>> get touched anymore by what I see.
>>
>> You may think that I'm wrong. I'm probably.
>>
>> Now just to make clear: I funded all the PhD of Clement, and all the
>> work of Igor around the VM.
>> And many other engineers and PhD (C. Bruni, Sophie, ...)
>> I'm fighting to make the Pharo consortium working so that we can pay
>> people like Esteban
>> (Esteban is not working in Pharo just because he cannot find a job
>> outside our little community and this
>> is the case for many other people) and other people.
>>
>> Stef
>>
>> On Sun, Apr 1, 2018 at 2:33 PM, Nicolas Cellier
>> <nicolas.cellier.aka.n...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> 2018-04-01 11:36 GMT+02:00 Stephane Ducasse <stepharo.s...@gmail.com>:
>>>>
>>>> Hi Torsten
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for this question.
>>>>
>>>> Ephemerons do not work in Pharo sadly and we know it. We cannot then
>>>> take advantage of them.
>>>> What you see is in fact a degradation of the situation around the VM. :(
>>>> We are concerned about this but the path for our future in this domain
>>>> is unclear.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Hi Stephane,
>>> the future is in your hand.
>>> Put milestones on opensmalltalk-vm, open new entries on opensmalltalk-vm
>>> issue tracker, put engineering force to solve pharo-specific build failures.
>>> In one word, help us to help you.
>>>
>>> So could you please explain what did you do exactly to help ephemerons being
>>> implemented in spur, and what are the forces couter-acting your efforts?
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> What is clear is that we will reduce the number of Plugin (as pablo
>>>> did for freetype) and use FFI.
>>>> But FFI callbacks are not really good. And we need a threaded VM. Now
>>>> nothing happens on this front.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Yes, we all want that!
>>> It's just that it does not happen by magic nor handwaving.
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Let us face it there is a bad energy around. After years of discussion
>>>> our engineers
>>>> are still struggling and slowed down because of the dispersion of plugin
>>>> code.
>>>> In addition, from what I understood there is no development branch :)
>>>> amazing is not it in 2020!
>>>>
>>> How sarcasms are going to  federate and encourage people to make progress?
>>> What can you obtain with this sort of sentence but further splitting the
>>> community?
>>> Is it your goal?
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On another scale, since 1 year, I was focusing on making that our
>>>> institute offers a permanent position to Clement but I failed
>>>> because the forces against where too strong (politics) and clement
>>>> should reapply next year.
>>>> Now to improve his CV, clement is doing a postdoc at VUB and will
>>>> start working on Truffle (the VM of Oracle)
>>>> and continue to work part time on Sista.
>>>> This is not that bad,  like that he will gain experience on other
>>>> systems and in the future
>>>> we will be in the position to see if there are real alternatives for
>>>> us. May be writing a new VM
>>>> on top of other existing infrastructure is the way to go. We will see
>>>> in the future.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Unfortunately, the rules of French institutions certainly do not help you...
>>> Maybe Truffle is a possible future for you, more solid than 100% own fork
>>> for sure.
>>>
>>>
>>>> To be fully transparent
>>>>
>>>> - we will have one phd working on IoT and how to reduce/clean the image
>>>> and
>>>> VM size and many other points she will probably work on a fork because
>>>> I cannot suicide a
>>>> student (by asking her to understand the messy plugin architecture)
>>>> and she will need some space to experiment.
>>>> Now if improvements she will perform take ages to be integrated in the
>>>> main VM I will ask
>>>> her not to do it and to focus on her future and science.
>>>> I imagine that everybody paying attention to people can understand this.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> Good to know that you are paying attention to people, I had the impression
>>> that this was not allways the case.
>>> I'm willing to help Pharo, I've helped producing Pharo brand 64 bits windows
>>> VM more than one year ago.
>>> I'm struggling to make the community beneficial to all, but I don't feel
>>> like I get a lot of support and wonder if I'm not completely mistaken when I
>>> see all the efforts deployed to tear it apart...
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Stef
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 9:00 PM, Torsten Bergmann <asta...@gmx.de> wrote:
>>>> > Hi,
>>>> >
>>>> > by accident I stumbled upon the following code in
>>>> > AnnouncementSubscription:
>>>> >
>>>> >  makeWeak
>>>> >    action isBlock ifTrue: [ self error: 'Not currently available due to
>>>> > missing ephemerons support'].
>>>> >    ...
>>>> >
>>>> > My understanding is that we have Ephemeron support in Pharo now working.
>>>> > Right?
>>>> >
>>>> > Anyone with more insights who knows how to fix/complete this? Should we
>>>> > at least open an issue?
>>>> >
>>>> > Thx
>>>> > T.
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>>
>>>
>>
>

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