Thanks!
> On 14 dic 2015, at 11:32 a.m., Esteban Lorenzano <esteba...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> On 14 Dec 2015, at 11:24, Esteban Lorenzano <esteba...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> We will start migration to Spur today.
>> To complete it, we will require some time, specially to adapt the CI and
>> check everything is ok.
>>
>> Spur will allow us to do a big step forward in Pharo development, in the
>> concrete you will see it immediately for this:
>> - We have noticed a speed increment of 100% in tiny benchmarks (and
>> according to Eliot, it will be at least 35% in general on the system).
>> - No more GC stops (noticeable when running large systems)
>> - We will be able to scale our systems up to 2G memory consumption without
>> loosing performance.
>>
>> But, this will have some drawbacks in the first times:
>>
>> 1) VM will not be compatible between versions anymore: Pharo 5.0 will have a
>> Pharo Spur VM associated (and they are not compatible).
>> - There WILL NOT be a "non-spur" version of Pharo 5.0. Once completed
>> the transitions, this will be the only one.
>>
>> 2) NativeBoost-FFI implementation has been replaced with a new
>> implementation who relies in ThreadedFFIPlugin and IA32Plugin. While we
>> worked a lot to do this transition as painless as possible and we achieve a
>> good level of backward compatibility (most uses of #nbCall: should work out
>> of the box), there are some problems we cannot solve:
>> - there are some stuff not possible to compatibilise, notably:
>> - Structures now need to inherit from FFIExternalStructure
>> - Arrays now are now shadowed
>> - in general is a bit slower (impossible to compete with ASM) but in
>> general is not perceptible.
>> - THERE WILL BE BUGS AND NON-IMPLEMENTED FEATURES: Current
>> implementation is validated with Athens and even Roassal was working, but of
>> course that does not covers all cases.
>> 2.1) ASMJIT will be removed from system and put in a separated packages.
>> NOTE: There will be a blog post explaining FFI-NB architecture during the
>> week.
>>
>> 3) There are more or less 70 new failing tests, some of them important than
>> we need to fix as soon as possible. Please, please, please, help us with
>> them :)
>>
>> 4) In general we foresee the system will became unstable some weeks, before
>> it gets back to normal. Please be patient.
>>
>> 5) You will need to adapt your Pharo 5.0 related apps and CI processes (to
>> take care about new VM). Some programs will stop work at all (for example, I
>> think Pharo-launcher will need to be adapted).
>>
>
> ah, I forget it!
>
> 6) Some changes to the VM accumulated during the time of transition (some
> months now). So, some changes introduced there will not be present in new VM.
> I will merge this changes in the next weeks.
>
> cheers!
> Esteban
