PTerm now supports Pharo 9 and Pharo 10
PTerm, the (only) terminal emulator for Pharo has been initially developed and maintained on Pharo 7. Due to some major API changes, PTerm was not compatible with higher version of Pharo such as 9 and 10. Porting it to Pharo 9 and 10 was long time in my to do list, but i didn't have spare time for such task. Fortunately, with the help of Kris, after many issues and pull requests, PTerm finally works on Pharo 9 and 10.
Dispatching tasks to multiple Pharo VMs using SystemProcess
Doing a research work in robotic domain using Pharo as a prototype and implementation tool (via phaROS) is a whole new experience. It is quite impressive to see how quick an implementation idea becomes a working prototype/solution in Pharo thanks to its productive development environment. Most of my robotic applications are critical tasks which require real-time performance, some of them are heavily resource-demanding (CPU). Due to the single process nature of Pharo, running these tasks on the same VM results in a performance bottleneck, thus sometime, violate the real-time requirement of the application. Common solution to this problem is to dispatch these tasks to several native system processes to boost the performance. Unfortunately, this feature is not supported in current Pharo. My goal in this case is to have something that allow to:
- maintain the use of Pharo's productive environment, so implementation the applications in another language is not an option
- be able do dispatch tasks to different system processes, (in this case, tasks running on different VMs using the same image), and have a simple inter-VM communication mechanism
And that is when SystemProcess plays its role.
PTerm: yet another Terminal Emulator for Pharo
I use Unix terminal a lot in work, when i work with Pharo and ROS (PhaROS), switching regularly between Pharo and native terminal application (for ROS command line) is kind of inconvenient. I've been thinking of using a terminal emulator application for Pharo. Googling around, i found out that there is no such thing that is ready for production work on modern Pharo, except a prototype work of Pavel Krivanek available at: https://github.com/pavel-krivanek/terminal. However, that code is messy, buggy, and not ready for production work . So i decided to take my time to work on it.