[HN Gopher] Pony, Actors, Causality, Types, and Garbage Collection
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Pony, Actors, Causality, Types, and Garbage Collection
Author : pjmlp
Score : 51 points
Date : 2020-09-07 10:52 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.infoq.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.infoq.com)
| Thaxll wrote:
| What's the status with Wallaroo Labs and Pony, are they still
| using the language?
| posnet wrote:
| https://github.com/WallarooLabs/wallaroo is probably the largest
| example of an open source pony project.
| ProfHewitt wrote:
| Actors are described here:
|
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3418003
| devmunchies wrote:
| Judging from github contributions and user profiles it looks like
| the creator, Sylvan Clebsch, works in the Microsoft Research Lab,
| but he isn't involved anymore. Someone else working at Microsoft,
| Sean Allen, is the new owner?
|
| https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/graphs/contributors
|
| Is MSFT involved with pony (that'd be huge) or is this just a
| MSFT employee side project?
| spooneybarger wrote:
| Hi Sean Allen here. Pony core team member. Friends with Sylvan
| since 1988.
|
| Sylvan is still involved with Pony but he doesn't contribute
| directly to the codebase these days.
|
| Microsoft isn't involved with Pony- it's still an all-volunteer
| project. A number of people associated with/working on Pony are
| also part of the Verona project from Microsoft Research.
|
| There's a lot of cross fertilization going on between Verona
| and Pony. A number of interesting ideas from Verona will
| probably find their way back into Pony (although many of them
| are "below the covers" so folks probably won't be aware).
|
| The current Pony core team can be seen here:
| https://github.com/orgs/ponylang/teams/core/members
| pjmlp wrote:
| Sylvan Clebsch now is on Project Verona, alongside David
| Chisnall that used to contribute to GNUStep and also researcher
| on CHERI CPU.
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-ver...
|
| The Imperial College hosts a Microsoft Research unit.
| devmunchies wrote:
| wow so many languages being researched/developed at
| microsoft. There's this one too:
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/bosque-
| prog...
| ssivark wrote:
| Is there a clear explanation of how Pony's concurrency (actor)
| model is different from Erlang/Elixir, and what implications that
| has in practice?
| rkallos wrote:
| Yes there is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0m0_qtfzLs
| staticassertion wrote:
| Pony is an amazing language, but I feel like it burned its entire
| complexity budget. Reference capabilities are really great, but
| they have this weird special syntax around them, and they're all
| termed in a very unique way.
|
| I very much want a language like Pony because, as this talk
| demonstrates, it's doing some incredibly cool and powerful
| things. But it's pretty confusing.
|
| Rust types like Arc, Mutex, &, &mut, and affine, have been wayyyy
| easier to learn for me because they aren't totally new concepts -
| I know what Arc is, Mutex, references are, moves are new but
| that's just one thing and it wasn't too crazy coming from C++. I
| know how to convert between these types because they're regular
| structures, with methods and documentation like all other
| structures. This is in really direct contrast to my experience
| with Pony where I had to learn like 6 new keywords, try to map
| them back to my own reference model, and, worst of all, trying to
| remember the strange incantation to map between them. I bet this
| is a "learn it once" thing, and it would be fine if that were the
| _only_ new thing, but it 's not - there are object capabilities,
| actors, learning the runtime/GC, learning new libraries, etc -
| there just isn't enough complexity budget in my brain for all of
| these things.
|
| I contrast this with Rust, which people consider quite hard to
| learn, and Pony has just been way, way harder. It's a little "too
| good" - nothing in Pony is unjustifiable, like not having
| assertions/ failures, but I really want those things! Division by
| 0 is a perfectly fine thing to define as returning 0, I seriously
| don't even care, but it's just one more straw.
|
| All in all, I was so hooked on learning Pony at first, totally
| enamored, and then I just found that I couldn't justify putting
| in the time.
|
| I ended up writing an actor library inspired in part by Pony for
| Rust, using macros, and I've been fairly satisfied - though
| there's much more Pony offers, by far. I'd really like to see
| more actor model languages crop up, and incorporating many
| features that Pony has, but maybe making some 'worse is better'
| decisions in a few places.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The team behind Pony are also the main designers on Project
| Verona, so they are taking up on those learnings as well.
| rkallos wrote:
| I had the opposite experience to you. I found Pony much easier
| to learn than Rust.
|
| Reference types are probably the trickiest bit to learn,
| especially in how they relate to Pony's generics. Everyone is
| different, but I found learning the 6 reference capabilities to
| be a lot easier than trying to understand borrowing and
| lifetimes in Rust.
|
| I readily accept other reasons not to pursue Pony; it's library
| ecosystem is budding, the runtime is still a bit unstable, and
| there is limited support for non-x86_64 architectures. However,
| I invite anyone reading this comment to form their own opinion
| of the language. I feel I've benefited greatly from learning
| it.
|
| Also, Pony has a pretty active community on Zulip, where you
| will find people who will jump at the chance to help you get
| unstuck while you're writing Pony.
| https://ponylang.zulipchat.com/
| the_duke wrote:
| I was excited about Pony a few years ago.
|
| But then the company went bust and development slowed down. I
| checked it out again ~ 1 year ago and both language and ecosystem
| did not look terribly healthy or active.
|
| What's the current status?
|
| ps: I love the video + synchronized slides side by side. I wish
| this was more common for talks. There should be resizing
| functionality though.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is being researched at Imperial College London, which hosts
| a Microsoft Research unit, it was brought there as Sylvan
| Clebsch joined Microsoft.
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/pony-co-desig...
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-ver...
| spooneybarger wrote:
| Hi,
|
| Excellent question. I can't address "healthy or active" as
| those would really be your own metrics to decide.
|
| We have a lot of things going on including:
|
| Work on a new dependency manager:
| https://github.com/ponylang/corral
|
| Work on an installation tool to make it easier to get started
| with Pony: https://github.com/ponylang/corral
|
| A lot of work has gone into making our release process across
| projects much easier to deal with as it was problematic before.
|
| Joe, a core team member, has been working on ideas to address
| problems that we've seen folks experience with Pony. He has a
| semi-functional experimental compiler that will hopefully see
| the light of day eventually.
|
| We've been working on some runtime improvements that will
| eventually see the light of day.
|
| Most of the work that goes on these days is in repos other than
| the ponyc repo that most people tend to look at.
|
| In the end, the important thing to know is that Pony is a
| volunteer driven project and thus, moves at a different
| timeline than something like Go or Rust with a lot of backing.
|
| Those of working on Pony are doing it because we believe that
| in the long run, the time we put in outside of our jobs will be
| worth it. But our timeline is probably a lot longer than other
| folks.
|
| -Sean, a Pony core team member.
| smallstepforman wrote:
| I've been following Pony for a couple of years, and fear they've
| lost momentum and drive, which doesn't bode well for the future
| of the language. My major grief is no support for "locked" (or
| synchronous) patterns, ie. when actor#A needs to modify actor#B
| and have the change accessable in the same Actor#A::Behaviour. In
| my own Actor framework (C++), I'm forced to implement a
| LockToWorkThread() pattern where I prohibit Actor#B from being
| scheduled on other work threads while locked. This way 2 Actors
| can interact from an "atomic" Behaviour() function. However, C++
| doesnt protect against sharing pointers so I'm always on
| eggshells.
| ivanbakel wrote:
| It seems like your major grief is at serious odds with the
| design principles of the language itself.
|
| It's very difficult to introduce any kind of synchronous
| behaviour that doesn't also allow deadlocks. "Locking" an actor
| to prevent it from processing messages would very trivially
| allow for deadlocks - and since Pony intends to avoid them by
| design, the language can't ever allow for it.
|
| Why are promises not fit for your purpose?
| spooneybarger wrote:
| Verona has been exploring the idea of "behavior-oriented
| programming" as compared to "actor-oriented" like we have in
| Pony.
|
| Verona's model allows for something along the lines of what
| is being suggested. How that works out in the long run, we'll
| see. It's still very early days for Verona.
|
| A number of folks working on Pony also are associated with
| Verona and vice-versa so there's a cross-polination of ideas
| going on.
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/verona
|
| In particular see:
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/verona/blob/master/docs/explore.
| ..
|
| and
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/verona/blob/master/docs/explore.
| ..
| spooneybarger wrote:
| I can't speak for everyone ever associated with Pony, but there
| are several of us who continue to work on it and haven't lost
| our drive.
| spooneybarger wrote:
| I'd like to extend an invitation to anyone who is interested in
| learning more about Pony to join us in our community Zulip.
| Various Pony core team members, committers, and other interested
| folks are often on and regularly answer questions etc from people
| who are interested in learning more.
|
| https://ponylang.zulipchat.com/#
|
| And you can find more Pony related content on the website:
|
| Talks (and what-not): https://www.ponylang.io/community/planet-
| pony/ Papers: https://www.ponylang.io/community/#papers
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