Last Week in Pony August 20, 2023
Time to upgrade your ponyc.
Items of Note¶
Update to Pony 0.55.1 As Soon As Possible¶
We’ve fixed a “random memory error” bug that was introduced in Pony 0.54.1. You should update to 0.55.1 as soon as possible. It’s a bad bug, fortunately, it only affects programs built with the --debug ponyc option.
We’ve “Dropped” FreeBSD¶
FreeBSD is no longer a fully supported platform. We are in the process of moving all our CI to GitHub Actions and in the process, are losing our FreeBSD CI.
We are not removing FreeBSD support from the ponyc codebase, however, we are also not making any attempt to test any changes to verify that FreeBSD works. Any FreeBSD support going forward will have to come from interested community members who can provide patches as needed to address any issues.
There are no more nightly versions of ponyc for FreeBSD being built. The same will soon apply to ponyup and corral.
0.55.1 was the last ponyc release that we built for FreeBSD. No future releases of ponyup or corral will have FreeBSD support.
You can still build from ponyc and corral from source on FreeBSD.
macOS on Intel is a Fully Supported Platform Again¶
With our move from CirrusCI to GitHub Actions, we again have an environment were we can test on MacOS for Intel. We’ve added macOS on Intel as a fully supported platform.
We plan to maintain support for as long as we continue a CI environment available and Apple continues to support new OS releases on x86 CPUs.
Nightly builds the Pony compiler are already available. Release builds will be available starting with the Pony 0.56.0 release at the end of August.
Nightly versions of corral and ponyup for macOS on Intel are available now. Once Pony 0.56.0 is released, release versions of corral and ponyup will follow shortly thereafter.
Enjoy!
Pony Development Sync¶
Audio from the August 16th, 2023 sync is available.
We mostly discussed issue #4369. Primarily, the underlying bug that has existed for a long time and also how we accidentally triggered it as part of our upgrading from LLVM 14 to LLVM 15.
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.
In addition to “non-Pony” conversation, Red and Sean discussed the process for getting some additional functionality that Red added to his fork of ponylang/net_ssl into the main branch. Beyond that, Sean also demonstrated to Red how to use the Pony HTTP client to do POST and PUT operations.
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.
Releases¶
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 we highlight how to write platform dependent code! We have a Tutorial page for this topic. There is also a Platform primitive in builtin. And for those of you that want a peek behind the curtain, these flags are defined here in the source tree. Beyond what is said in the Tutorial, you can use ifdef with the same flags to change smaller sections of code, see the definition of files/Path.sep() which provides ‘\’ when on windows and ‘/’ for all other platforms.
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!