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
   

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2. Sean T Allen
   Author of Storm Applied
   Member of the Pony core team
   VP of Engineering at Wallaroo Labs
   @SeanTAllen
   

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

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

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

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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.”
   

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7. Why Pony?
   

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

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9. Highly Concurrent
   

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10. Highly Concurrent
    Actor model
    Async messaging
    Work stealing scheduler
    Mechanical sympathy
    

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11. Predictable latencies
    

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

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13. Data Safety
    

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14. Data Safety
    Reference Capabilities
    

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15. Batteries not required
    

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16. Batteries not required
    Small Standard Library
    C-FFI
    

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17. Results
    

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

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19. Pain
    

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

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21. Is Pony right for you?
    

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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…
    

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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
    

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24. Links, references, and more…
    https://github.com/SeanTAllen/pony-how-i-learned-to-stop-
    worrying
    

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