The cloud offer with the price you cited is similar to running pharo on you own virtual linux machine. The ephemeric cloud is different: it uses pharo images themselves as containers and provides a simple Rest API to start them up.
Cost is $10 for up to 20 running images, the free account gives you already one to play.
The difference is that the ephemeric image is never saved, gets automatically killed after 30 minutes (and restarted when needed).
If you are interested in helping with the Editor and improving text support in general... the first step is to help with the new text model. If you are interested, contact us. It would be nice to have that ready for Pharo4 :-)
We are working on bootstrapping Pharo from source. Have a look here: https://github.com/guillep/PharoKernel But it's tricky and I guess it will take until Pharo4 or Pharo5 until this is in the main release
1) No. The object-as-sources ("storeString") is very slow an has many negative effects. E.g. the result is a large string, you need the compiler for de-serialization... all in all, if you look at current Smalltalks, this feature is not used too much.
Saving the whole state of the world to an image is not implemented by using #storeString. Instead it saves the whole heap of the vm to a file. Very fast, but of course this means that the resulting file is specific for 32bit vs. 64bit, endianess... and, very important, object layout (Object Headers are saved as they are in memory). So it is not really serialisation in the classic meaning of the word.
2) Implementing storeString like in Smalltalk needs some reflective features, e.g. enumerating instance variables, setting instance variables after creating new objects when recreating. And the compiler needs to be part of the language, as the string is one huge Smalltalk expression.
3) For image snapshotting serialization is not really the correct term.
The memory is just written from RAM to Disk. For #storeString, yes, this is serialization.
1) normal pharo cloud 2) ephemeric
The cloud offer with the price you cited is similar to running pharo on you own virtual linux machine. The ephemeric cloud is different: it uses pharo images themselves as containers and provides a simple Rest API to start them up.
Cost is $10 for up to 20 running images, the free account gives you already one to play.
The difference is that the ephemeric image is never saved, gets automatically killed after 30 minutes (and restarted when needed).