5 ms·

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

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...

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...