Programming Languages, Martials Arts and Computers. The Weblog of Chris Double.
8 posts
I've written about reference capabilities in the Pony programming language spread across some of my other posts but haven't written about them directly. This post is my attempt to provide an intuitive understanding of reference capabilities and when to use consume and recover. Hopefully this reduces the confusion when faced with reference capability compilation errors and the need to memorize... more →
The 'TL;DR' of this post on how to borrow internal fields of iso objects in Pony is: more →
Pony is an actor oriented programming language. In Pony Actors are objects that can send and receive messages asychronously while processing their received messages sequentially and in parallel with other actors processing their messages. They are the unit of concurrency in the language. Each actor is similar to a lightweight thread of execution in languages that support those. For background... more →
If you've looked at Pony programming language code you've probably seen use of punctuation symbols in places and wondered what they meant. This post is an attempt to explain three of those - the bang, hat and arrow (!, ^ and -> respectively). Note that this is my understanding based on usage, reading the tutorials and watching videos so there... more →
Note 2017-08-01: Recent releases of Pony have changed syntax for lambda calls and partial function calls. This post has been updated to work with these changes as of Pony 0.16.1. The Pony programming language has support for closures but the documentation hasn't caught up with changes to the implementation. This post describes some of the features of Pony closures with... more →
Support for compiling Pony programs on ARM and 32-bit x86 landed recently. This allows compiling and running Pony on Raspberry Pi and other ARM devices. I was curious if it would be possible to compile Pony programs to run on Android and this post outlines how I got a "Hello World" example working. The Pony compiler, ponyc, does not currently... more →
Note 2017-08-01: Recent releases of Pony have changed some of the details of interacting with C. This post has been updated to work with these changes as of Pony 0.16.1. My quick look at Pony post covered how to use the FFI to call C code from a Pony program. It's also possible to compile Pony code to a C... more →
Pony is a new programming language described on their site as "an open-source, object-oriented, actor-model, capabilities-secure, high performance programming language." It has some interesting features and is different enough to existing popular programming languages to make it a nice diversion to experiment with. Some features include: more →