While Pony is awesome, I think what you describe is a weakness and not a strength. If Pony were to move more of its hardest concepts to standard libraries, it w

While Pony is awesome, I think what you describe is a weakness and not a strength. If Pony were to move more of its hardest concepts to standard libraries, it would be a far simpler language, even if it maintained the actor/behavior concepts. Much of Pony can be done with Arc/Mutex/&/move in Rust, but with special syntax, and it's that special syntax that kills the language frankly. You can implement actors in Rust pretty easily. I've done it multiple times, including in a way that provides a pony-like nominal interface. It isn't as powerful, and it isn't as efficient, because frankly I'm not very good at this sort of thing and don't have time to work on it, but it's possible. What pony gives is some syntactic sugar in some important places (the actor keyword, the be keyword) and a very strong runtime.