Pony

Most engineers think GC is slow. They’re wrong. Coordination is slow. Pony’s per-actor heaps and message-passing model eliminate the coordination that makes traditional garbage collectors a performance problem.

I treated Claude like a junior engineer, taught it principles, and watched it grow. Two weeks later, it’s on my short list.

Sylvan Clebsch, Mike Shah, and I talk about how Pony came to be, walk through Pony Patterns, and discuss the language’s design.

Kris Jenkins and I dig into reference capabilities, Pony’s actor model, and how it implements garbage collection without stop-the-world pauses.

How we picked Pony to build a sub-millisecond latency stream processor for Wall Street, and what happened next.

A Papers We Love talk on how Pony uses deny capabilities to give you data-race freedom and fearless concurrency.

A QCon NY 2019 panel covering the promises and perils of building distributed systems without coordination.

Why we chose Pony to build Wallaroo, what made it work, and where its immaturity bit us.