Slides

Abstract

Pony is an interesting “new” programming language I discovered over the summer; I thought people might be interested in learning more about it in a brief (~20 min), informal talk.

In Pony’s own words, it is an “open-source, object-oriented, actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language” offering the following set features:

  • Type safe
  • Memory safe
  • Exception-Safe
  • Data-race Free
  • Deadlock-Free
  • Native Code
  • Compatible with C

In this short talk I’ll be giving a brief overview of what makes Pony unique, how it achieves some of the above features, and the current state of its development and use.

For more information, you can visit the Pony language website (https://www.ponylang.org/) or peruse the following papers that describe some of the foundational aspects of their language’s semantics:

  • Deny capabilities for safe, fast actors (https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2824816)
  • Ownership and Reference Counting based Garbage Collection in the Actor World (https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~scd/icooolps15_GC.pdf)