Jump to content

Draft:Pony (programming language)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Pony
ParadigmActor model, Object-oriented, Imperative
Designed bySylvan Clebsch[1]
First appeared28 April 2015; 9 years ago (2015-04-28)[2]
Stable release
0.58.7 / November 30, 2024; 30 days ago (2024-11-30)
Typing disciplinestrong, static, inferred, nominal, structural
Implementation languageC
LicenseBSD-2.[3]
Websitewww.ponylang.org
Influenced by
E
Influenced
Project Verona

Pony (also referred to as ponylang) is a free and open source, object-oriented, actor model, capabilities-secure, high performance programming language.[4][5] Pony's reference capabilities allow even mutable data to be safely passed by reference between actors. Garbage collection is performed concurrently, per-actor, without the need to "stop the world".[6][7][8] Sylvan Clebsch is the original creator of the language.[9][10] It is now being maintained and developed by members of the Pony team.[11]

History

[edit]

The language was created by Sylvan Clebsch when earning his Ph.D at Imperial College London. His professor was Sophia Drossopoulou, who is also well known for her contributions to computer programming, and as a lecturer. According to developers who have talked to Sylvan, he was frustrated with not having a high performance language that could run concurrent code securely, along with other attributes that he wanted. The result is he began development on Pony.[12]

Language design

[edit]

At its core, Pony is a systems language designed around safety and performance.

Safety

[edit]
  • Type Safety - Pony is a type safe language.[13][5]
  • Memory Safety - There are no dangling pointers and no buffer overruns. There is no null but optional types can be safely represented using unions with the None type.[4]
  • Exception Safety - There are no runtime exceptions. All exceptions have defined semantics and they are always caught.[14]
  • Concurrency Safety - The type system employs reference capabilities to ensure (at compile time) that your program is free of data races and deadlocks.[15][16][17]

Performance

[edit]
  • Lock-Free - By design, Pony avoids the need for traditional locking mechanisms, which eliminates the overhead and contention associated with locks.[5][12]
  • Native Code - Pony is an ahead-of-time (AOT) compiled language. There is no interpreter or virtual machine[15]
  • Concurrent Garbage Collection - Each actor's heap is collected separately and concurrently, avoiding the need to "stop the world" for global collection.[9][10]

Examples

[edit]

A few examples of idiomatic Pony follow.

Hello World

[edit]

In Pony, instead of a main function, there is a main actor. The creation of this actor serves as the entry point into the Pony program. 

actor Main
  new create(env: Env) =>
    env.out.print("Hello, world!")

There are no global variables in Pony, everything must be contained within an instance of a class or an actor.[12][18] As such, even the environment that allows for printing to stdout is passed as a parameter.

References

[edit]
  1. ^ "Creator of Pony". Google Scholar.
  2. ^ "First public release". GitHub. 28 April 2015.
  3. ^ https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/blob/master/LICENSE
  4. ^ a b Allen 2024.
  5. ^ a b c Alex Lashkov (26 July 2023). "The New Wave of Programming Languages: Pony, Zig, Crystal, Vlang, and Julia". Hackernoon. Retrieved 24 December 2024.
  6. ^ Sylvan Clebsch; Juliana Franco; Sophia Drossopoulou (12 October 2017). "Ownership and Reference Counting Based Garbage Collection in the Actor World". ACM Digital Library. doi:10.1145/3133896. Retrieved 24 December 2024.
  7. ^ "Introduction to the Pony Programming Language". LinkedIn. Society 5 Solutions. 15 October 2024. Retrieved 28 December 2024.
  8. ^ Daniel Caccamo (2018). "GoA: Actors with Locally Managed Memory for Go". UWSpace. Retrieved 28 December 2024.
  9. ^ a b Charles Humble (14 March 2016). "Using the Actor-model Language Pony for FinTec". InfoQ. Retrieved 24 December 2024.
  10. ^ a b Sophia Drossopoulou (14 September 2020). "Pony, Actors, Causality, Types, and Garbage Collection". InfoQ. Retrieved 24 December 2024.
  11. ^ "Team Pony". GitHub. Retrieved 28 December 2024.
  12. ^ a b c Kristoffer Grönlund (22 January 2018). Everyone gets a pony!. archive. Linux Conference Australia 2018 (LCA2018). Retrieved 28 December 2024.
  13. ^ https://www.ponylang.org/media/papers/fast-cheap.pdf
  14. ^ MCStone 2023.
  15. ^ a b Mölle 2017.
  16. ^ Sean T Allen (30 May 2018). "Introduction to the Pony programming language". opensource. Retrieved 28 December 2024.
  17. ^ Sylvan Clebsch; Sophia Drossopoulou; Sebastian Blessing (October 2015). "Deny capabilities for safe, fast actors". In Elisa Gonzalez Boix, Philipp Haller, Alessandro Ricci, Carlos Varela (ed.). AGERE! 2015: Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control. Pittsburgh, PA, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 1–12. doi:10.1145/2824815.2824816. ISBN 9781450339018.{{cite conference}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
  18. ^ Peter Hellberg. "From Go to Pony". c7. Retrieved 28 December 2024.

Further reading

[edit]
  • Mölle, Andreas (Dec 2017). "Developing concurrent programs with Pony". Linux Magazine (205). ISSN 1536-4674.
  • MCStone, Maverick (Dec 2023). Pony Playbook: Mastering the Basics of Concurrent Programming. Independently Published. ISBN 979-8870768175.
  • Allen, Corby (Jul 2024). Pony Programming: The Complete Guide to Building High-Performance, Concurrent, and Secure Applications with Pony. Independently Published. ISBN 979-8332662072.
[edit]
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Pony_(programming_language)&oldid=1266191287"