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What about the use of Pony? I did not hear about it before but I do like some of the ideas of the language I read on their website. However, they also state "Po

What about the use of Pony? I did not hear about it before but I do like some of the ideas of the language I read on their website. However, they also state "Pony is pre-1.0. We regularly have releases that involve breaking changes. This lack of stability is plenty of reason for many projects to avoid using Pony." How are you going to deal with that?

spooneybarger 9y ago
I personally work at both Wallaroo Labs and am on the Pony core team. A number of engineers at Wallaroo Labs are committers to Pony. We are active members in the Pony community and a large driver of many of those breaking changes to Pony. At least 3/4 of the breaking changes to Pony over the last 9 months came from us at Wallaroo Labs. From our side it's not particularly problematic to make the occassional update.
- fermigier 9y ago
  "At least 3/4 of the breaking changes to Pony over the last 9 months came from us at Wallaroo Labs." -> And you're proud of yourselves ?!? (Just kidding of course).
  - spooneybarger 9y ago
    I'm going to be writing a blog post on this, but you inspired me to touch on it a bit. When we went looking at what we should use to implement Wallaroo, one of the things that appealed to us about Pony was that it was a high-performance actor based runtime that we could help mold. We gave consideration to writing our own implementation in C but, we'd still be working on that rather than talking here on HN now if we had. Pony has gotten us quite a bit. The runtime was used for a number of production projects at one of the major banks so we knew that while there might be some bugs (what code doesn't have them) that we could use it to jumpstart our process. I gave a talk about Pony and its relation to Wallaroo where I put out the figure of 18 months. I think that as a wild ass guess, using the Pony runtime saved us about 18 months of work to build the foundation we want/need for Wallaroo. Speaking as a member of the Wallaroo Labs team, it's really nice to have a community based project that you can help mold and grow with. It's been a boon to us as a small development shop in a way that either writing from scratch ourselves or using an existing more widely used runtime wouldn't be. Speaking as a Pony core team member, I encourage other companies who think they could benefit from a high-performance actor based runtime to have a look at Pony. You could have a large hand in shaping it into the runtime that you need.
devy 9y ago
There are quite a interesting ideas floating on Quora about Pony[1]. Unfortunately, after the demise of Casualty where the original authors worked, the language didn't seem to go anywhere. [1]: https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-experience-with-using-Pony-programming-language https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-experience-with-using-Pon...
- spooneybarger 9y ago
  Speaking as a member of the Pony community, the Pony community has done quite well since Casuality ceased to exist. I addressed this on the Pony mailing list a while back: https://pony.groups.io/g/user/topic/on_the_state_of_pony/2518002?p=,,,20,0,0,0::Relevance,,state,20,2,0,2518002 https://pony.groups.io/g/user/topic/on_the_state_of_pony/251... I'd also like to note that the statement that Sylvan is no longer involved in the Pony community in that post is very offbase. He's a founding member of the Pony core team and still actively involved.
  - 0cachecoherency 9y ago
    Hi, I'm Sylvan Clebsch, the designer of Pony. I'm very much involved in Pony, as are most of the Causality founders in various ways. It's unfortunate that this kind of misinformation keeps being passed around.
    - devy 9y ago
      Good to know that Sylvan! Honest suggestion: you should debunk that misinformation on Quora which has a bigger audience than HN here.

spooneybarger 9y ago

I personally work at both Wallaroo Labs and am on the Pony core team. A number of engineers at Wallaroo Labs are committers to Pony. We are active members in the Pony community and a large driver of many of those breaking changes to Pony. At least 3/4 of the breaking changes to Pony over the last 9 months came from us at Wallaroo Labs. From our side it's not particularly problematic to make the occassional update.

fermigier 9y ago
"At least 3/4 of the breaking changes to Pony over the last 9 months came from us at Wallaroo Labs." -> And you're proud of yourselves ?!? (Just kidding of course).
- spooneybarger 9y ago
  I'm going to be writing a blog post on this, but you inspired me to touch on it a bit. When we went looking at what we should use to implement Wallaroo, one of the things that appealed to us about Pony was that it was a high-performance actor based runtime that we could help mold. We gave consideration to writing our own implementation in C but, we'd still be working on that rather than talking here on HN now if we had. Pony has gotten us quite a bit. The runtime was used for a number of production projects at one of the major banks so we knew that while there might be some bugs (what code doesn't have them) that we could use it to jumpstart our process. I gave a talk about Pony and its relation to Wallaroo where I put out the figure of 18 months. I think that as a wild ass guess, using the Pony runtime saved us about 18 months of work to build the foundation we want/need for Wallaroo. Speaking as a member of the Wallaroo Labs team, it's really nice to have a community based project that you can help mold and grow with. It's been a boon to us as a small development shop in a way that either writing from scratch ourselves or using an existing more widely used runtime wouldn't be. Speaking as a Pony core team member, I encourage other companies who think they could benefit from a high-performance actor based runtime to have a look at Pony. You could have a large hand in shaping it into the runtime that you need.

devy 9y ago

There are quite a interesting ideas floating on Quora about Pony[1]. Unfortunately, after the demise of Casualty where the original authors worked, the language didn't seem to go anywhere. [1]: https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-experience-with-using-Pony-programming-language https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-experience-with-using-Pon...

spooneybarger 9y ago
Speaking as a member of the Pony community, the Pony community has done quite well since Casuality ceased to exist. I addressed this on the Pony mailing list a while back: https://pony.groups.io/g/user/topic/on_the_state_of_pony/2518002?p=,,,20,0,0,0::Relevance,,state,20,2,0,2518002 https://pony.groups.io/g/user/topic/on_the_state_of_pony/251... I'd also like to note that the statement that Sylvan is no longer involved in the Pony community in that post is very offbase. He's a founding member of the Pony core team and still actively involved.
- 0cachecoherency 9y ago
  Hi, I'm Sylvan Clebsch, the designer of Pony. I'm very much involved in Pony, as are most of the Causality founders in various ways. It's unfortunate that this kind of misinformation keeps being passed around.
  - devy 9y ago
    Good to know that Sylvan! Honest suggestion: you should debunk that misinformation on Quora which has a bigger audience than HN here.