New Collections for Pharo
Hi everyone! My name is Smiljana, and during the GSoC 2019, I will be working on implementing the Containers library for Pharo. This project is being mentored by Yurko Tymchuk and Stéphane Ducasse.
Pharo is an elegant and easy to learn pure objected-oriented programming language that comes with an amazing and intuitive IDE that has everything anyone needs to start coding. Pharo also comes with a large set of collections with around 100 classes, but there are also many new and powerful collections developed in Pharo, that are not yet part of the Pharo project.
There is an existing effort - The Containers modular library, to gather many of the existing collections and include them into Pharo as well as develop some new ones. The idea of this project is to create a modular collection library for Pharo users and to develop new efficient, well-tested, well documented collections. The key idea is modularity - it is important that each package is modular so that users can only load the collection they need without 100 of related collections, and thus significantly reduce the image size.
During the first week of the community bonding period I was primarily focused on getting the blog up and running as well as getting to know other participants and introducing myself to the Pharo community. I also created a twitter account @KnezevSmiljana and talked with my mentors about some directions for my project. I have already received some comments and suggestions about new collections that would be useful from other Pharo users. I am happy to find out that the Pharo community also finds my project of interest.
During the following few weeks of the bonding period I plan on collaborating with my mentors on defining a priority list of the collections that need to be improved and implemented. I plan on starting with revisiting existing collections in Pharo and also taking a look at existing collections that are not yet included in Pharo.