Last Week in Pony - September 3, 2023

Apparently Sean was getting paid by the commit this week.

Items of Note¶

CirrusCI Migration Update¶

All done! Everything has been moved off of CirrusCI or “decommissioned”.

DockerHub to GitHub Container Registry Migration¶

As we mentioned last week, we are migrating from DockerHub to GitHub Container Registry. On December 1^st, we’ll stop updating images in DockerHub. This past week we updated the following images:

ponylang/changelog-bot-action

We’ve updated so that future releases will post to both registries while our migration is underway. It’s unlikely that we are going to do a release during the migration so to make sure that we have something in GHCR, we’ve uploaded 0.3.5 to GHCR.

ponylang/changelog-tool

We’ve updated so that future releases will post to both registries while our migration is underway. It’s unlikely that we are going to do a release during the migration so to make sure that we have something in GHCR, we’ve uploaded 0.5.0 to GHCR.

ponylang/corral
ponylang/library-documentation-action
ponylang/library-documentation-action-v2
ponylang/ponyc

We’ve merged the PR to start uploading builds, both nightly and release, to GitHub Container Registry. By the time you read this, nightly images will have been uploaded. On the next release, release images will be available via GitHub Container Registry as well.

ponylang/ponyup
ponylang/release-bot-action
ponylang/release-notes-bot-action

We’ve updated so that future releases will post to both registries while our migration is underway. It’s unlikely that we are going to do a release during the migration so to make sure that we have something in GHCR, we’ve uploaded 0.3.7 to GHCR.

ponylang/release-notes-reminder-bot-action

We’ve updated so that future releases will post to both registries while our migration is underway. It’s unlikely that we are going to do a release during the migration so to make sure that we have something in GHCR, we’ve uploaded 0.1.1 to GHCR.

That’s everything that needs to move. Next up, on or after December 1^st, we’ll turn off pushing images to DockerHub. Please be sure to transition by then.

Pony Development Sync¶

Audio from the August 29^th, 2023 sync is available.

We covered a bunch of PR and issues. Most were related to our CirrusCI migration that we finished and our DockerHub migration that is just getting underway.

We spent a good amount time going over the latest from issue #4369.

A lot of disparate ground was covered, so have a listen!

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.

We had another long Office Hours this week. About an hour and forty-five minutes total. We initially discussed with Red whether OpenSSL is adding full QUIC support as in, it implements the full protocol. Turns out they are and the 3.2 release will have QUIC client support in it and we assume, a later release will have server support.

From there we spent a good amount of time with Victor Morrow looking for his memory corruption bug in the QUIC library he is working on. It appears that by the end, we had the problem “narrowed down” to a single memcpy call. But, time will tell if we were correct. Along the way, we discovered a compilation issue with some code that was merged into ponyc last month.

Adrian Boyko was also in attendance and was incredibly helpful when he translated a Victor question that Sean was struggling with into “is malloc thread-safe”? Adrian is great at translating into Sean. Bless him.

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.

Let’s look at what may be a mathematical oddity of Pony: Dividing by Zero. In many languages, dividing an integer by zero is undefined or results in a runtime exception. Neither of these happen in Pony with the default integer division operator. Instead, Pony defines any number divided by zero to equal zero. But why? The reason is a practical one: performance. Dividing by zero is rare and often avoidable so we opt for the default case to reflect this. Additionally, if you want to handle division by zero we have two more options: partial division (numerator /? denominator) and unsafe division (numerator /~ denominator). The former makes division by zero an error, while the latter makes division by zero undefined (as in C).

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!