Last Week in Pony - December 04, 2022
It was a week of releases and CI changes. We’ve switched from FreeBSD 13.0 to FreeBSD 13.1. We’ve dropped Rocky 8 support (for now anyway). We released a new ponyc with a wicked important bug fix. We released a far less interesting version of corral. So, kids, grab a Moxie, put on some Johnny Cash and dig in. It’s that time again, Last Week in Pony time!
Items of Note¶
Highly recommended ponyc release¶
We released a new version of ponyc this week. It fixes race conditions in cycle detector/actor interactions that could lead to segfaults. We strongly advice updating if you are able.
Dropping Rocky 8 support¶
We can no longer get ponyc building in our Rocky 8 CI environment. After spending several hours attempting to get it working, we were unable to. Rocky 8 prebuilt binaries was added at the request of a user in 2021. We said we would do our best to maintain support.
At this point, we don’t feel able to support Rocky 8 and are dropping support. If anyone using ponyc on Rocky 8 wants to get the CI environment working and open a PR to re-add support, we’ll happily accept it.
The current issue involves libatomic not being found during linking. If you would like to assist, hop into the CI stream on the ponylang Zulip.
FreeBSD 13.1 is our supported FreeBSD version¶
This week we merged support for FreeBSD 13.1 and moved our ponyc CI system to test against FreeBSD 13.1 rather than 13.0. All pre-built ponyc binaries will be built for FreeBSD 13.1 as of November 29. Corral and Ponyup will be moving soon but no date is set yet.
Pony Development Sync¶
Audio from the November 29th, 2022 sync is available.
Our weekly sync call was primarily dominated by conversation about two topics. A discussion of issues around the fix for issue #1118 and discussion of options for alerting to errors from StdStream.
It was an excellent call. Not at all an ordinary “marching through tickets” sync. This would be one we recommend for folks who “listen to the recording sometimes”.
If you are interested in attending a Pony Development Sync, please do! We have it on Zoom specifically because Zoom is the friendliest platform that allows folks without an explicit invitation to join. Every week, a development sync reminder with full information about the sync is posted to the announce stream on the Ponylang Zulip. You can stay up-to-date with the sync schedule by subscribing to the sync calendar. We do our best to keep the calendar correctly updated.
Office Hours¶
We have an open Zoom meeting every Friday for the community to get together and well, do whatever they want. In theory, Sean T. Allen “owns” the meeting and will often set an agenda. Anyone is welcome to show up and participate. Got a Pony related problem you need help solving and prefer to do it synchronously? Give Office Hours a try.
This week in Office Hours, we talked about our approaches and solutions to this year’s Advent of Code, while learning some new syntax along the way! Later on Matthias and Adrian dug into ponyc issue #3658, but found out that they need to dig further to understand why the subtype-check keeps recursing. This particular issue has been the topic of Office Hours previously.
Interested in giving attending Office Hours sometime? There’s a calendar you can subscribe to to stay up-to-date with the schedule. We do our best to keep the calendar up-to-date.
Releases¶
Highlighted Issues¶
Pony is a volunteer driven project. Nothing gets down without someone volunteering their time and helping to push things forward. Yes, there are folks who dedicate more time than others and a core team that dedicates time specifically for guiding Pony’s development. Everyone’s time is limited, so each week, we highlight a couple of issues that we hope will inspire someone to volunteer their time to help fix.
In addition to our highlighted issues, you can find more that we are looking for assistance on by visiting just about any repository in the ponylang org and looking for issues labeled with “help wanted”
If you are interested in working on either issue or any other issue from a Ponylang repository, you can get in touch on the issue in question or, even better, join us on the Ponylang Zulip to strike up a conversation.
This week’s issues as selected by Ryan A. Hagenson are:
stdlib documentation¶
We still have some stdlib packages with limited documentation. Someone taking this issue should feel comfortable writing documentation and have a general ability to read Pony code. However, it is by no means expected that a new contributor tackle all of stdlib’s documentation so feel free to start small! A good example of good documentation in stdlib (in my, Ryan A. Hagenson’s, opinion) is pony_check, which has a good mix of usability focused examples and purpose-driven API explanations.
Improve Range and Reverse¶
During the discussion of the empty ranges RFC, we noted there are still a considerable number of footguns in the ranges API that warrant a redesign. Someone taking this issue should read through the previous discussion, take previously mentioned concerns into mind, and write up an RFC proposing a new Range and Reverse to replace the current design.
Last Week In Pony is a weekly blog post to catch you up on the latest news for the Pony programming language. To learn more about Pony, check out our website, our Twitter account @ponylang, or our Zulip community.
Got something you think should be featured? There’s a GitHub issue for that! Add a comment to the open “Last Week in Pony” issue.
Interested in making a change, or keeping up with changes to Pony? Check out the RFC repo. Contributors welcome!