8 ms·

Pony is an open-source, actor-model, high performance programming language

95 points by kordless 11y ago

cobaltblue 11y ago
Whence the high performance claim? I tried finding some benchmarks, and apparently they used to be on the home page since this was on HN about a year ago, but I didn't find any recent ones. It would be nice to see it compared to, say, Rust, Nim, Haskell, OCaml, C...
- ggchappell 11y ago
  That's a good point. But I do see where the claim is coming from. Pony is aimed at the same kind of compile-to-bare-metal that we do with C, C++, Fortran, etc. Furthermore, Pony's design explicitly deals with many of the issues that get in the way of aggressive optimization in other PLs: pointer aliasing, dynamic type checking, data races, etc. So Pony was clearly designed with high performance in mind. And it seems likely to me that the efforts made in that direction are practical, workable ones. But that is not the same as saying, "We can write a Pony compiler that generates fast code." And it is certainly not the same as, "We have written a Pony compiler that generates fast code."
  - smaddox 11y ago
    Looks like they use LLVM backend, so they'll get low level optimisation for "free". The GC is also interesting: fully concurrent and lock-free.
- doublec 11y ago
  There's some benchmarking of simple fib type things here [1]. [1] https://cdn.rawgit.com/darach/my_little_pony/master/my-little-pony.html#/2/4 https://cdn.rawgit.com/darach/my_little_pony/master/my-littl...
- rurban 11y ago
  Well, it's faster than C++ with OpenMP so it's definitely the fastest safe language around. For sure faster and safer than Rust, and it looks better to the eye also. What I'm missing are FFI finalizers and GC triggers as with libsigsegv. Long running hungry actors can force unhandled out of memory.
  - dbaupp 11y ago
    The grandparent was looking for concrete evidence/examples for the "high performance" label, not just another assertion of high performance.
    - felixgallo 11y ago
      https://cdn.rawgit.com/darach/my_little_pony/master/my-little-pony.html#/2/4 https://cdn.rawgit.com/darach/my_little_pony/master/my-littl...
betenoire 11y ago
The audience of a programming language are developers. Developers like code, code speaks to us. Actual code samples are a few clicks away: http://tutorial.ponylang.org/getting-started/helloworld/ http://tutorial.ponylang.org/getting-started/helloworld/ pony-lang devs: put some examples on the home page!
- krat0sprakhar 11y ago
  Came here just to say this! Please add code snippets on the home page. Here are a few things that I'd like to get an idea about from the language's homepage - Concurrency, Type safety, Pattern Matching and Higher order functions. Visually examining a code-snippet that directly communicates the above would be a huge sell! A few examples to look at 1. Rust - https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://www.rust-lang.org/ 2. Elixir - http://elixir-lang.org/ http://elixir-lang.org/ 3. Go - https://golang.org/ https://golang.org/
- ggchappell 11y ago
  Strongly agree. The main webpage for any programming language should always include a bit of sample code -- generally a short but nontrivial complete program.
- systems 11y ago
  completely agree, syntax does matter but your link doesnt show much syntax better look here http://tutorial.ponylang.org/expressions/methods/ http://tutorial.ponylang.org/expressions/methods/
- m8rl 11y ago
  Actually, more example code at http://tutorial.ponylang.org/examples/examples/ http://tutorial.ponylang.org/examples/examples/
  - betenoire 11y ago
    this is what I was looking for, thank you :) I should have kept scrolling clear to the bottom of the nav, I gave up early.
ggchappell 11y ago
This looks interesting. There are a few things I wonder about. From the first page of the tutorial (http://tutorial.ponylang.org/ http://tutorial.ponylang.org/): > It's exception safe. There are no runtime exceptions. All exceptions have defined semantics, and they are always handled. This seems contradictory. Are there exceptions or not? EDIT. Apparently there are (http://tutorial.ponylang.org/expressions/exceptions/ http://tutorial.ponylang.org/expressions/exceptions/). But then I don't understand what the above means. > It's deadlock free. This one is easy, because Pony has no locks at all! This is nonsense. Deadlock happens when multiple processes/threads are waiting for each other. It is not caused by locks. From another tutorial page (http://tutorial.ponylang.org/types/static-vs-dynamic/ http://tutorial.ponylang.org/types/static-vs-dynamic/): > There's no such thing as null, so your program will never try to dereference null. But there is "None" (http://tutorial.ponylang.org/types/primitives/ http://tutorial.ponylang.org/types/primitives/). How is "None" so different from this "null" that we want to avoid? On the positive side: As I said this looks interesting. The type system appears to have been well thought out. Intersections look like a sane way to provide functionality that other PLs either implement poorly (perhaps via "multiple inheritance"), or simply disallow. And if the type system really does offer all the claimed guarantees, then it is a very good thing indeed. The partial applications, the concurrency model, and the handling of immutability are also clearly features that someone has given a lot of thought to. I cannot judge the results at this point, but I like well-thought-out things. :-) And the notion of "apply", along with the shortcut syntax, seems like it provides a standard, easy to understand way to make lot of code pretty simple. I hope to be able to look into this PL more closely in the near future.
- steveklabnik 11y ago
  > How is `None` so different from this "null" that we want to avoid? The difference is the defaults. Languages "with null" generally assume that any value can be null. Other languages, like Pony, do not allow any type to be null. Pony's "None" type is an example of a "unit type": a type with only one possible value. It's a totally different thing.
  - betenoire 11y ago
BenoitP 11y ago
The papers[1] is where is the meat is. > Ownership and Reference Counting [...] We propose Pony-ORCA, a fully concurrent protocol for garbage collection in the actor paradigm > with shared memory [...] introduces a new form of write uniqueness > a dedicated actor for the detection of (cyclic) garbage So, Erlang + shared state? Rust + GC + green threads? I'm very happy there is activity in this space; I feel like there a whole class of massively online realtime applications just waiting to happen. 5k users first person shooter anyone? [1] https://github.com/ponylang/ponylang.github.io/tree/master/papers https://github.com/ponylang/ponylang.github.io/tree/master/p...
- steveklabnik 11y ago
  > Rust + GC + green threads? I haven't used Pony much yet, but when I first saw it, this was my first connection. In some, but not all, ways, it is like what Rust used to be at a certain moment in its history. The languages have different goals, so it's not like I think this means Rust is better or something.
  - Matthias247 11y ago
    No, I don't think the similarity is big. Pony is all the way about asynchronous/nonblocking messaging. Rust with green threads was favoring synchronous/blocking calls, just like Go, which probably also suits the ownership model better. So Pony might be better compared to Erlang with a strong type system and without a blocking receive method than to Rust or Go.
    - steveklabnik 11y ago
      Yeah, I mean, this is why comparing languages solely based on feature lists is a bad idea; it's also about things like idioms. It's more like, "in some ways, Rust was trying to be similar to Erlang, and in some ways, Pony is trying to be similar to Erlang, so in some ways, Pony and Rust are kinda similar." Emphasis on the 'kinda'. (And I'm thinking about Rust _pre_ ownership model, here. And Rust does have non-blocking IO, just not in the standard library. It's not imcompatible with ownership.)
3pt14159 11y ago
wget -O - http://releases.ponylang.org/buildbot@lists.ponylang.org.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add - This is not secure. Non https connections cannot be trusted. It is trivial for a cafe owner to MITM this and now he is generally trusted with your apt-get. BAD.
desireco42 11y ago
I think it is fair to say that developers don't have most sensibility when it comes to UX, and often UI, so I think let's allow Pony Lang maintainers to make site a little bit easier to read and attract us. Honestly, these days, we have a lot of choices, you really need to woo us, show us why would we want to program in this language.
z3t4 11y ago
I find this interesting, but a bit too complex. As a hardcore JavaScript programmer I make use of clusters or spawn child process to handle "actors" and I think that is much easier to reason about. I would be happy if Pony had some examples of how to manage "world" state. For example if two objects in a 2D world intersects, or when one actor fires a laser, decide if another actor was hit by it. I'm writing server code for MMO's and it seems like Erlang, Pony, etc would be the magic tool for such systems, but I never seem to "get it".
- fenollp 11y ago
  Erlang is far from "a bit too complex": it's just not. What is difficult from devs coming from the imperative world is getting recursion & bind-variables-only-once (what is commonly known as "the syntax is ugly"). Please, have a look at http://learnyousomeerlang.com/content http://learnyousomeerlang.com/content
mhuangw 11y ago
Definitely seems more practical than the other pony language, FIM++

95 points by kordless 11y ago

Whence the high performance claim? I tried finding some benchmarks, and apparently they used to be on the home page since this was on HN about a year ago, but I didn't find any recent ones. It would be nice to see it compared to, say, Rust, Nim, Haskell, OCaml, C...

ggchappell 11y ago
That's a good point. But I do see where the claim is coming from. Pony is aimed at the same kind of compile-to-bare-metal that we do with C, C++, Fortran, etc. Furthermore, Pony's design explicitly deals with many of the issues that get in the way of aggressive optimization in other PLs: pointer aliasing, dynamic type checking, data races, etc. So Pony was clearly designed with high performance in mind. And it seems likely to me that the efforts made in that direction are practical, workable ones. But that is not the same as saying, "We can write a Pony compiler that generates fast code." And it is certainly not the same as, "We have written a Pony compiler that generates fast code."
- smaddox 11y ago
  Looks like they use LLVM backend, so they'll get low level optimisation for "free". The GC is also interesting: fully concurrent and lock-free.
doublec 11y ago
There's some benchmarking of simple fib type things here [1]. [1] https://cdn.rawgit.com/darach/my_little_pony/master/my-little-pony.html#/2/4 https://cdn.rawgit.com/darach/my_little_pony/master/my-littl...
rurban 11y ago
Well, it's faster than C++ with OpenMP so it's definitely the fastest safe language around. For sure faster and safer than Rust, and it looks better to the eye also. What I'm missing are FFI finalizers and GC triggers as with libsigsegv. Long running hungry actors can force unhandled out of memory.
- dbaupp 11y ago
  The grandparent was looking for concrete evidence/examples for the "high performance" label, not just another assertion of high performance.
  - felixgallo 11y ago
    https://cdn.rawgit.com/darach/my_little_pony/master/my-little-pony.html#/2/4 https://cdn.rawgit.com/darach/my_little_pony/master/my-littl...

betenoire 11y ago

The audience of a programming language are developers. Developers like code, code speaks to us. Actual code samples are a few clicks away: http://tutorial.ponylang.org/getting-started/helloworld/ http://tutorial.ponylang.org/getting-started/helloworld/ pony-lang devs: put some examples on the home page!

krat0sprakhar 11y ago
Came here just to say this! Please add code snippets on the home page. Here are a few things that I'd like to get an idea about from the language's homepage - Concurrency, Type safety, Pattern Matching and Higher order functions. Visually examining a code-snippet that directly communicates the above would be a huge sell! A few examples to look at 1. Rust - https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://www.rust-lang.org/ 2. Elixir - http://elixir-lang.org/ http://elixir-lang.org/ 3. Go - https://golang.org/ https://golang.org/
ggchappell 11y ago
Strongly agree. The main webpage for any programming language should always include a bit of sample code -- generally a short but nontrivial complete program.
systems 11y ago
completely agree, syntax does matter but your link doesnt show much syntax better look here http://tutorial.ponylang.org/expressions/methods/ http://tutorial.ponylang.org/expressions/methods/
m8rl 11y ago
Actually, more example code at http://tutorial.ponylang.org/examples/examples/ http://tutorial.ponylang.org/examples/examples/
- betenoire 11y ago
  this is what I was looking for, thank you :) I should have kept scrolling clear to the bottom of the nav, I gave up early.

ggchappell 11y ago

This looks interesting. There are a few things I wonder about. From the first page of the tutorial (http://tutorial.ponylang.org/ http://tutorial.ponylang.org/): > It's exception safe. There are no runtime exceptions. All exceptions have defined semantics, and they are always handled. This seems contradictory. Are there exceptions or not? EDIT. Apparently there are (http://tutorial.ponylang.org/expressions/exceptions/ http://tutorial.ponylang.org/expressions/exceptions/). But then I don't understand what the above means. > It's deadlock free. This one is easy, because Pony has no locks at all! This is nonsense. Deadlock happens when multiple processes/threads are waiting for each other. It is not caused by locks. From another tutorial page (http://tutorial.ponylang.org/types/static-vs-dynamic/ http://tutorial.ponylang.org/types/static-vs-dynamic/): > There's no such thing as null, so your program will never try to dereference null. But there is "None" (http://tutorial.ponylang.org/types/primitives/ http://tutorial.ponylang.org/types/primitives/). How is "None" so different from this "null" that we want to avoid? On the positive side: As I said this looks interesting. The type system appears to have been well thought out. Intersections look like a sane way to provide functionality that other PLs either implement poorly (perhaps via "multiple inheritance"), or simply disallow. And if the type system really does offer all the claimed guarantees, then it is a very good thing indeed. The partial applications, the concurrency model, and the handling of immutability are also clearly features that someone has given a lot of thought to. I cannot judge the results at this point, but I like well-thought-out things. :-) And the notion of "apply", along with the shortcut syntax, seems like it provides a standard, easy to understand way to make lot of code pretty simple. I hope to be able to look into this PL more closely in the near future.

steveklabnik 11y ago
> How is `None` so different from this "null" that we want to avoid? The difference is the defaults. Languages "with null" generally assume that any value can be null. Other languages, like Pony, do not allow any type to be null. Pony's "None" type is an example of a "unit type": a type with only one possible value. It's a totally different thing.
- betenoire 11y ago

BenoitP 11y ago

The papers[1] is where is the meat is. > Ownership and Reference Counting [...] We propose Pony-ORCA, a fully concurrent protocol for garbage collection in the actor paradigm > with shared memory [...] introduces a new form of write uniqueness > a dedicated actor for the detection of (cyclic) garbage So, Erlang + shared state? Rust + GC + green threads? I'm very happy there is activity in this space; I feel like there a whole class of massively online realtime applications just waiting to happen. 5k users first person shooter anyone? [1] https://github.com/ponylang/ponylang.github.io/tree/master/papers https://github.com/ponylang/ponylang.github.io/tree/master/p...

steveklabnik 11y ago
> Rust + GC + green threads? I haven't used Pony much yet, but when I first saw it, this was my first connection. In some, but not all, ways, it is like what Rust used to be at a certain moment in its history. The languages have different goals, so it's not like I think this means Rust is better or something.
- Matthias247 11y ago
  No, I don't think the similarity is big. Pony is all the way about asynchronous/nonblocking messaging. Rust with green threads was favoring synchronous/blocking calls, just like Go, which probably also suits the ownership model better. So Pony might be better compared to Erlang with a strong type system and without a blocking receive method than to Rust or Go.
  - steveklabnik 11y ago
    Yeah, I mean, this is why comparing languages solely based on feature lists is a bad idea; it's also about things like idioms. It's more like, "in some ways, Rust was trying to be similar to Erlang, and in some ways, Pony is trying to be similar to Erlang, so in some ways, Pony and Rust are kinda similar." Emphasis on the 'kinda'. (And I'm thinking about Rust _pre_ ownership model, here. And Rust does have non-blocking IO, just not in the standard library. It's not imcompatible with ownership.)

3pt14159 11y ago

wget -O - http://releases.ponylang.org/buildbot@lists.ponylang.org.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add - This is not secure. Non https connections cannot be trusted. It is trivial for a cafe owner to MITM this and now he is generally trusted with your apt-get. BAD.

desireco42 11y ago

I think it is fair to say that developers don't have most sensibility when it comes to UX, and often UI, so I think let's allow Pony Lang maintainers to make site a little bit easier to read and attract us. Honestly, these days, we have a lot of choices, you really need to woo us, show us why would we want to program in this language.

z3t4 11y ago

I find this interesting, but a bit too complex. As a hardcore JavaScript programmer I make use of clusters or spawn child process to handle "actors" and I think that is much easier to reason about. I would be happy if Pony had some examples of how to manage "world" state. For example if two objects in a 2D world intersects, or when one actor fires a laser, decide if another actor was hit by it. I'm writing server code for MMO's and it seems like Erlang, Pony, etc would be the magic tool for such systems, but I never seem to "get it".

fenollp 11y ago
Erlang is far from "a bit too complex": it's just not. What is difficult from devs coming from the imperative world is getting recursion & bind-variables-only-once (what is commonly known as "the syntax is ugly"). Please, have a look at http://learnyousomeerlang.com/content http://learnyousomeerlang.com/content

mhuangw 11y ago

Definitely seems more practical than the other pony language, FIM++