Discover the future of software from the people making it happen.Listen to some of the smartest developers we know talk about what they're working on, how they're trying to move the industry forward, and what you can learn from it. You might find the solution to your next architectural headache, pick up a new programming language, or just hear some good war stories from the frontline of technology.Join your host Kris Jenkins as we try to figure out what tomorrow's computing will look like the best way we know how - by listening directly to the developers' voices.
Pony: High-Performance, Memory-Safe Actors (with Sean Allen)
Pony is a language born out of what should be a simple need - actor-style programming with C performance. On the face of it, that shouldn’t be too hard to do. Writing an actor framework isn’t trivial, but it’s well-trodden ground. The hard part is balancing performance and memory management. When your actors start passing hundreds of thousands of complex messages around, either you need some complex rules about who owns and frees which piece of memory, or you just copy every piece of data and kill your performance. Pony’s solution is a third way - a novel approach to memory management called reference capabilities.
In this week’s Developer Voices, Sean Allen joins us from the Pony team to explain what reference capabilities are, how Pony uses them in its high-performance actor framework, and how they implement a garbage collector without stop-the-world pauses. The result is a language for performant actors, and a set of ideas bigger than the language itself…
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Pony: https://www.ponylang.io/
The Pony Tutorial: https://tutorial.ponylang.io/
The Pony Playground: https://playground.ponylang.io/
Azul Garbage Collector: https://www.azul.com/products/components/pgc/
Shenandoah Garbage Collector: https://wiki.openjdk.org/display/shenandoah/Main
A String of Ponies (Distributed Actors Paper): https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~scb12/publications/s.blessing.pdf
Garbage Collection with Pony-ORCA: https://tutorial.ponylang.io/appendices/garbage-collection.html
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