Last Week in Pony July 23, 2023
Barrelling downhill towards death because we didn’t attend Office Hours.
Items of Note¶
Pony Development Sync¶
Audio from the July 18th, 2023 sync is available.
We discussed and merged 2 PRs. It was a pretty quick call.
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.
I think there was an Office Hours this week. I got a notification that both Red and Joe joined, however, I was sick and didn’t attend, so… shrug. Let’s assume that we all missed the greatest Office Hours ever and that our lives are going to be downhill towards death from here on out. You know, something cheery.
If you’d be interested in attending an Office Hours in the future, you should join some time, 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.
Community Resource Highlight¶
We like to take a moment in each Last Week in Pony to highlight a community resource. There are many community resources that can go unappreciated until just the right time when someone hops into the Ponylang Zulip asking a question or facing a problem we have all had at one time or another. Well here in Last Week in Pony, we make it just the right time to highlight one of our excellent community resources.
This week let us look at a few Pony program examples in the main ponyc repository. These examples all include a README describing the program, walking you through how the compile it, what it will do, and most will also suggest how you might modify the program to learn different aspect of Pony. Let’s walk through the pony_bench example a bit further.
It may seem “strange” to some that Pony has its own microbenchmarking framework, but the reason is simple: benchmarking is difficult and especially do under asynchronicity. As pony_bench is in the standard library, a minimal Pony installation is all you need. Using a standard installation, simply change into the examples/pony_bench directory and run ponyc to compile it. This produces an executable named the same thing as the directory by default so you will now have a file at examples/pony_bench/pony_bench. If you run this file (./pony_bench), you will see a print out of a handful of benchmarks for calculating Fibonacci numbers. Now for the really fun part! This benchmark does not use the Fibonacci primitive from the math package (also in the standard library). By adding the correct “use” statement and a MicroBenchmark that calls this primitive you will have run a real microbenchmark comparing two implementations of the same thing!
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!