Pharo 1.0 Squeak fork released

The Pharo Project developers have announced the availability of version 1.0 of their implementation of the Smalltalk language and environment. Pharo, originally started in May of 2008, is a fork of the Squeak open source Smalltalk from a group of developers that were responsible for Squeak 3.9. The developers say that they "felt the need to reconsider choices made" with version 3.9 of Squeak. Their goal with Pharo is to "create a better Smalltalk and be free to enhance it without fear of backwards compatibility to Squeak".

The project's first official release, which the developers consider to be "a reinvention of Smalltalk", addresses more than 1,000 bugs and features reorganised menus, core class improvements, full block closure support and improved developer tools. Other changes in Pharo 1.0 include improvements to the overall look and feel, and new widgets from the Polymorph project. The UIBuilder has been updated and a new theme system has been added.

More details about the release, including a full list of changes, can be found in the release notes. Pharo 1.0 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Screencasts and documentation are provided. Pharo is released under the MIT License with parts under the Apache License.

See also:

• Squeak 4.0 released, a report from The H.

(crve)