But what we have missed is integrating the last twenty years of computer science research into our programming models. We’ve spent a lot of time dealing with dynamic languages, which is great. I think that is a good thing but we haven’t spent a lot of time dealing with modern native languages. We are just now starting to get it. For example, Go. Go is brilliant. Go is astoundingly brilliant but their goal wasn’t actually highly fast, highly concurrent computation.

Pony’s focus is a bit different. Pony’s focus is a combination of a statically typed, type safe Erlang-like (in the sense of using actors) language with a much higher performance runtime. One that lets you do all of the fun stuff that you do with generics and parametric polymorphism and all the power that you get out of modern languages like Scala or Haskell. It is funny to call Haskell a modern language but it is. It is still innovative after all this time. Or Rust. Rust has a lot of these great features. The idea behind Pony was to co-design the type system and the runtime so that the type system gives enough guarantees that the runtime can be written for pure performance, that the runtime is lock free. With Pony, you know your entire program is guaranteed to be lock free, data race free and deadlock free by construction. That is pretty fun - but you can still have mutable data. We are not doing this with only immutable data.

Every actor can independently collect its heap without coordinating with any other actor and yet we can share data by pointer that was allocated by actor B with actor A. That is pretty fun. It works in a distributed environment and requires a lot less coordination than most distributed garbage collection systems. In fact, for collecting objects as opposed to actors, the nodes don’t have to coordinate in order to collect objects. They can all collect objects locally with no coordination in the same way that an actor collects its heap locally without coordination.

I am going to talk a bit about stuff that is hard: data races, message queues, scheduling, things like that. Martin Thompson obviously does tons of cool stuff in this area. Then I want to get into some patterns that make it easier in Pony. Things like modeling orders as actors. I’ll talk about how simple data flow patterns are in Pony because you are sending messages.