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Last Week in Pony - December 22, 2024

Other than the publishing of a conversation about Pony with myself, Mike Shah, and Sylvan Clebsch, it was a pretty average week in Pony.

Items of Note

A Conversation About Pony (and more)

A couple weeks ago, Sylvan and I did an interview/conversation with Mike Shah about Pony and other things computer. It was released on Friday. Both Sylvan and I had a great time and loved talking with Mike. We hope you enjoy it as well. Hopefully, we can chat with Mike again sometime.

Pony Programming Language with Sylvan Clebsch and Sean Allen – Conversation #7

No Development Syncs the Next 2 Weeks

We are taking a break for the Holidays. See you in 2025!

Pony Development Sync

The recording of the December 17, 2024 Pony development sync is available. Check it out on Vimeo.

Office Hours the Next 2 Weeks

We have Office Hours scheduled the next 2 weeks. I’m not sure if I will be in attendance. I will be playing it by ear each Monday based on what I have going on in my life while taking some time off from work.

Office Hours

I wasn’t at Office Hours this past week but Joe was. He provided the following summary:

  • We discussed Pony’s underlying pool allocator, and how it works. Specifically, we discussed size classes, thread-local free lists, and the clever trick it uses of reusing the soon-to-be-deallocated buffer to store the linked list pointer without allocating a new data structure.
  • We looked at Red’s solution for calling a C API via FFI that expects a pointer to an array of a C unions using a Pony tuple of mixed members. Joe also proposed a different approach with different pros and cons - in this specific case where the C union members can all boil down to different numeric types, and the union has a 64 bit size/alignment, Joe suggested that Red could also consider converting each element to a U64 and send an Array[U64] buffer pointer to the FFI function.
  • We discussed other programming languages, and talked about the use cases for specialized languages that make more assumptions vs “general-purpose” languages that make fewer assumptions.

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 or our Zulip community.

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