Sunday, August 20, 2017

programming language Pony (no null, no locks)

a potentially better version of Erlang, interesting, but not yet 1.0

Pony Language Designer Sylvan Clebsch on Pony’s Design, Garbage Collection, and Formal Verification @InfoQ
"...Sylvan Clebsch, who is the designer of the actor-model language Pony programming and now works at Microsoft Research in Cambridge in the Programming Language Principles group."


  • Pony scales from a Raspberry Pi through a 64 core half terabyte machine to a 4096 core SGI beast
  • An actor has a 256-byte overhead, so creating hundreds of thousands of actors is possible
  • Actors have unbounded queues to prevent deadlock
  • Each actor garbage collects its own heap, so global stop-the-world pauses are not needed
  • Because the type system is data-race free, it’s impossible to have concurrency problems in Pony


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