Pony: How I learned to stop worrying and embrace an unproven technology

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Pony How I learned to stop worrying and embrace an unproven technology

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Sean T Allen Author of Storm Applied Member of the Pony core team VP of Engineering at Sendence

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Pony Open-source, object-oriented, actor-model, capabilities- secure, high-performance programming language

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This talk is… The story of Pony told through the story of Wallaroo; the product we built with it…

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Wallaroo High-performance, distributed stream processor High-throughput Low-Latency Consistent performance Resource efﬁcient

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-Sylvan Clebsch “ A programming language is just another tool. It’s not about syntax. It’s not about expressiveness. It’s not about paradigms or models. It’s about managing hard problems.”

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Why Pony?

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Why Pony? Highly concurrent Predictable latency demands Data Safety “Batteries” not required

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Highly Concurrent

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Highly Concurrent Actor model Async messaging Work stealing scheduler Mechanical sympathy

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Predictable latencies

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Predictable Latencies No “stop the world” GC Per-actor heaps Better clustering

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Data Safety

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Data Safety Reference Capabilities

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Batteries not required

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Batteries not required Small Standard Library C-FFI

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Results

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Results 18 month jumpstart for “free” Excellent performance More conﬁdent refactoring Some pain

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Pain

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Pain Pre-1.0 Compiler bugs Breaking changes Limited tooling Runtime knowledge required

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Is Pony right for you?

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Is Pony right for you? You have a hard concurrency problem You aren’t reliant on a lot of existing libraries You are willing to write “most everything” from scratch Yes, if…

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“Fintech” Questions

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“Fintech” Questions How do I shard my data? How do I do priority queues? How do I only process the most recent messages?

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Takeaways… Pony has a powerful, data-race free, concurrency-aware type system The Pony runtime can help you solve hard concurrency problems You might be able to use Pony for ﬁntech in production now

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Trash Day paper: https://www.usenix.org/system/ﬁles/conference/hotos15/ hotos15-paper-maas.pdf ORCA paper: https://www.ponylang.org/media/papers/OGC.pdf

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@seantallen www.monkeysnatchbanana.com @SendenceEng www.sendence.com @ponylang www.ponylang.org #ponylang on freenode