Why Pony?

Pony is a new language designed to make fast, concurrent programing simple. Its actor-based concurrency and advanced type system ensure programs are data race and deadlock free. We'll compare Pony to more mature technologies, starting with when you shouldn't use it, when you should, and what your alternatives might be. You'll learn about Pony's design philosophy, how the actors simplify writing safe code and more. You'll leave understanding what Pony is and if it's something you might use.

Transcript

1. Why Pony?
   Bleeding edge technology for your concurrency woes
   

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

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

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4. -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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5. Why Pony?
   

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6. Why Pony?
   Highly Concurrent
   Predictable latencies
   Data Safety
   

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7. Highly Concurrent
   

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

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9. Predictable latencies
   

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

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11. Data Safety
    

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12. Data Safety
    Reference Capabilities
    

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13. Why Not Pony?
    

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14. Why Not Pony?
    Concurrency isn’t your problem
    Lack of API Stability
    “Batteries Not Included”
    Limited Native Tooling
    

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15. Is Pony right for you?
    

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16. 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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17. 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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18. 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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19. @seantallen
    www.monkeysnatchbanana.com
    @SendenceEng
    www.sendence.com
    @ponylang
    www.ponylang.org
    #ponylang on freenode
    

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