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Have been impressed with Pony the few times I've seen it on HN, thanks for your work on Pony and Wallaroo. I'm guessing that tooling for Pony still needs some

Have been impressed with Pony the few times I've seen it on HN, thanks for your work on Pony and Wallaroo. I'm guessing that tooling for Pony still needs some refinement, but as things are now what would you recommend to someone new to Pony (e.g. editor, package manager, build tools, debugging tools)? Oh and just out of interest, did you evaluate Rust as a language for Wallaroo? I do think Pony has the potential to be stronger in certain areas, but it seems like there's a certain amount of overlap in terms of use cases.

jtfmumm 9y ago
I'm an engineer at Wallaroo Labs and I've been writing Pony for the last two years. We're using pony_stable (which is the primary package manager at the moment) and make for managing builds. I currently use Sublime 3 as my editor and lldb for debugging. I know that others are using emacs and vim as well. We did consider Rust as there are certainly overlaps in their approaches to safety (though coming from different angles). In the end we thought that Pony would be better for managing concurrency for our particular use cases, which we thought mapped well onto the actor model.
- kodablah 9y ago
  > we thought mapped well onto the actor model. Out of curiosity, were there a widely accepted actor lib/approach in Rust (I know there are a few like RobotS and others), would that have affected your decision?
  - spooneybarger 9y ago
    It might have. When we were looking at Rust, it was a topic of conversation.
    - steveklabnik 9y ago
      In general, it's not a space where there's a hyper-mature library, but there are some cool stuff happening today: http://cityboundsim.com/devblog/my-full-rustfest-talk-with-networking-live-demo http://cityboundsim.com/devblog/my-full-rustfest-talk-with-n... That said, I mean, if you want to go full actors, Pony is a great choice.
      - Cyph0n 9y ago
        Oh wow, I used to follow Citybound development a while ago when it was still written in JS. Anselm is an amazingly talented developer and it's great to see him working with Rust!
aturley 9y ago
I'm also an engineer at Wallaroo Labs. A while back I wrote up some information for people who were interested in Pony: https://gist.github.com/aturley/49b60c98306d90ffc2f981515827b005 https://gist.github.com/aturley/49b60c98306d90ffc2f981515827... I've been using Emacs as an editor. We use a combination of make and pony-stable to build projects. For package management we use pony-stable. LLDB is your best bet for debugging, and if you follow the link above there's a link to the pony-lldb project, which is an LLDB extension that makes it easier to work with a few Pony datatypes.

jtfmumm 9y ago

I'm an engineer at Wallaroo Labs and I've been writing Pony for the last two years. We're using pony_stable (which is the primary package manager at the moment) and make for managing builds. I currently use Sublime 3 as my editor and lldb for debugging. I know that others are using emacs and vim as well. We did consider Rust as there are certainly overlaps in their approaches to safety (though coming from different angles). In the end we thought that Pony would be better for managing concurrency for our particular use cases, which we thought mapped well onto the actor model.

kodablah 9y ago
> we thought mapped well onto the actor model. Out of curiosity, were there a widely accepted actor lib/approach in Rust (I know there are a few like RobotS and others), would that have affected your decision?
- spooneybarger 9y ago
  It might have. When we were looking at Rust, it was a topic of conversation.
  - steveklabnik 9y ago
    In general, it's not a space where there's a hyper-mature library, but there are some cool stuff happening today: http://cityboundsim.com/devblog/my-full-rustfest-talk-with-networking-live-demo http://cityboundsim.com/devblog/my-full-rustfest-talk-with-n... That said, I mean, if you want to go full actors, Pony is a great choice.
    - Cyph0n 9y ago
      Oh wow, I used to follow Citybound development a while ago when it was still written in JS. Anselm is an amazingly talented developer and it's great to see him working with Rust!

aturley 9y ago

I'm also an engineer at Wallaroo Labs. A while back I wrote up some information for people who were interested in Pony: https://gist.github.com/aturley/49b60c98306d90ffc2f981515827b005 https://gist.github.com/aturley/49b60c98306d90ffc2f981515827... I've been using Emacs as an editor. We use a combination of make and pony-stable to build projects. For package management we use pony-stable. LLDB is your best bet for debugging, and if you follow the link above there's a link to the pony-lldb project, which is an LLDB extension that makes it easier to work with a few Pony datatypes.