Pony: How I learned to stop worrying and embrace an unproven technology - OSCON 2018

Conventional wisdom holds that you should never build your business on top of bleeding-edge technology. However, when Wallaroo Labs set out to build its high-performance stream processing engine, Wallaroo, the company chose to implement it in Pony—a high-performance actor-based programming language that has limited industry usage. So far, this decision has worked out very well.

Sean T. Allen explains what makes Pony different from other languages, the types of problems it can help solve, why he and his team used Pony, how it has made their jobs easier, and the times when Pony’s immaturity hindered them. You’ll leave with a solid understanding of Pony’s strengths and weakness so you can determine if it just might be the right language for your next project.

Transcript

1. Pony How I learned to stop worrying and embrace an unproven technology
2. Sean T Allen Author of Storm Applied Member of the Pony core team VP of Engineering at Wallaroo Labs @SeanTAllen
3. Pony Open-source, object-oriented, actor-model, capabilities- secure, high-performance programming language
4. This talk is… The story of Pony told through the story of Wallaroo; the product we built with it…
5. Wallaroo High-performance, distributed stream processor High-throughput Low-Latency Consistent performance Resource efficient
6. -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.”
7. Why Pony?
8. Why Pony? Highly concurrent Predictable latency demands Data Safety “Batteries” not required
9. Highly Concurrent
10. Highly Concurrent Actor model Async messaging Work stealing scheduler Mechanical sympathy
11. Predictable latencies
12. Predictable Latencies No “stop the world” GC Per-actor heaps Better clustering
13. Data Safety
14. Data Safety Reference Capabilities
15. Batteries not required
16. Batteries not required Small Standard Library C-FFI
17. Results
18. Results 18 month jumpstart for “free” Excellent performance More confident refactoring Some pain
19. Pain
20. Pain Pre-1.0 Compiler bugs Breaking changes Limited tooling Runtime knowledge required
21. Is Pony right for you?
22. 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…
23. 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 in production now
24. Links, references, and more… https://github.com/SeanTAllen/pony-how-i-learned-to-stop- worrying