The Genesis of Pony: A High-Performance Language

Speaker 2
This is Developer Voices, and today's voice is Sean Adams. Joining me today is Sean Allen. Sean, how are you? I'm
Speaker 1
good. How are you? I'm
Speaker 2
very well. Very well. A few people have been on me to check out Pony over the weeks and months. And one thing I learned from checking it out is the history of Pony begins trying to write concurrent high-performance actors in C, right? Yes.
Speaker 1
Yeah. Many, many years ago, Sylvan Klebsch, who created Pony, was working at one of the major banks and had built a framework for people to write highly concurrent programs using the actor model in C, but it had a variety of problems, most of which were related to the memory model, things crashing, seg faulting. Basically, there was nothing that was protecting you from yourself. It had all of the same problems that any standard C thing, which is doing threading, might do with unsafe sharing of memory, etc. And one of his takeaways from that was that while the runtime that he built was really good, there needed to be something more on top of that. There needed to be a compiler, which could actually enforce the safety properties that you would need in order to do high speed concurrent programming with an actor model. Okay,
Speaker 2
so I have to ask the question. This comes up immediately. You want to do memory safety or actor model. Why not go to Rust or Airline? Well,
Speaker 1
first of all, at the time when he did it, Rust was this tiny, tiny, tiny little thing that was barely being used um it might have actually i don't think that brust had actually been publicly announced at the point that sylvan first wrote that um and and erlang because you want to go fast and erlang is many things but fast is not one of them oh
Speaker 2
tell me more about that. Why is it not fast enough?
Speaker 1
I mean, if what you're interested in doing is things where you would normally turn to see, for example, for your performance concerns, then that's not Erlang. Erlang was never designed for that. That's not the environment that it was designed for. It does a variety of things. As a basic default, I'm going to lie here a little bit and say that pretty much any time you send a message from one actor to another in Erlang, there's going to be a copy that happens in terms of the memory that you're sending. have a thing called binaries which mean that that's not actually the case but it is the basic model that it was built with i mean the initial version of erlang was written in prologue right uh not the world's not the world's fastest language like extreme performance was never a concern for erlang Erlang has many incredible, incredible features in it. I mean, I think it's an awesome language. Sylvan thought it was an awesome language, but Erlang wasn't going to be good for those particular use cases.

Pony: High-Performance, Memory-Safe Actors (with Sean Allen)

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