Upgrade to Pro — share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …

Pony: How I learned to stop worrying and embrac...

Pony: How I learned to stop worrying and embrace an unproven technology - OSCON 2018

Conventional wisdom holds that you should never build your business on top of bleeding-edge technology. However, when Wallaroo Labs set out to build its high-performance stream processing engine, Wallaroo, the company chose to implement it in Pony—a high-performance actor-based programming language that has limited industry usage. So far, this decision has worked out very well.

Sean T. Allen explains what makes Pony different from other languages, the types of problems it can help solve, why he and his team used Pony, how it has made their jobs easier, and the times when Pony’s immaturity hindered them. You’ll leave with a solid understanding of Pony’s strengths and weakness so you can determine if it just might be the right language for your next project.

Sean T Allen

July 19, 2018
Tweet

More Decks by Sean T Allen

Other Decks in Technology

Transcript

  1. Sean T Allen Author of Storm Applied Member of the

    Pony core team VP of Engineering at Wallaroo Labs @SeanTAllen
  2. This talk is… The story of Pony told through the

    story of Wallaroo; the product we built with it…
  3. -Sylvan Clebsch “ A programming language is just another tool.

    It’s not about syntax. It’s not about expressiveness. It’s not about paradigms or models. It’s about managing hard problems.”
  4. Is Pony right for you? You have a hard concurrency

    problem You aren’t reliant on a lot of existing libraries You are willing to write “most everything” from scratch Yes, if…
  5. Takeaways… Pony has a powerful, data-race free, concurrency-aware type system

    The Pony runtime can help you solve hard concurrency problems You might be able to use Pony in production now