Pony is an actor-model, capabilities-secure, native programming language. I will talk about reference capabilities (a type system for data-race freedom influenced by object capabilities and deny guarantee reasoning), the ORCA and MAC protocols for fully concurrent no-stop-the-world garbage collection of both objects and actors, and extending Pony to the distributed setting.

Types, testability, tooling, paradigms, productivity, managed, native, concurrency, parallelism, performance, asynchrony, integrations, memory management, security, resilience, or, maybe, simple readability? What are the important things crossing the minds of language designers today as they build new languages or evolve the tried and trusted ones?

QCon convenes a panel of four language designers. These are people at the heart of questions like these. The computer science language panel is led by Martin Thompson and participants include:

• Brian Goetz (Java)
• Joe Duffy (Midori, C# Fork)
• Felix Klock (Rust)
• Sylvan Clebsch (Pony)

Come hear Martin ask the hard questions on choices made (past and future) and hear the discussion from the people behind some of the largest and most innovative languages in use by developers today.