Crank up this week’s theme song — Horse Outside by the Rubberbandits — and settle in. Big week. We welcomed a new committer, shipped three brand-new libraries, and put out ten releases across five projects. There’s also a persistent HashMap bug fix that enabled json-ng to drop its custom null type, three new Pony patterns, and a blog post about teaching Claude to write Pony.
Crank up this week’s theme song — George Jones doing “Hey Good Lookin’” — and settle in. Read fast, though. It’s not a long song and this week’s issue is longer than most. We’ve got thirteen releases across six projects. Major new versions of ponylang/ssl, ponylang/lori, and ponylang/ponyup, plus a preview of what’s been piling up in ponylang/postgres.
Busy week on the release front. Ponyc 0.60.6 squashes several compiler bugs that were crashing instead of giving you error messages, Alpine support got bumped to 3.23, and seantallen-org/msgpack landed a big update with streaming support and compact encoding.
There’s a new Pony available. It has a number of bug fixes and ships with a vastly improved language server. We suggest you upgrade soon.
There’s a Pony release coming next weekend—get ready—there’s lots of good stuff in it.
Not a lot of visible activity this week in Pony land, but there’s a lot going on and you can expect a few things to land in the not-so-distant future.
Sorry for the long delay between issues of Last Week in Pony. Life got in the way. I was down with the flu for several weeks. Then I fell out of rhythm and forgot a couple times that I write this thing up on Sundays.
Work this week focused on embedding LLVM’s lld linker into the Pony compiler to remove the C toolchain dependency. We’re starting with Linux and will move to other OSes later. MacOS CI is blocked by a GitHub Actions “hashFiles” issue, so there are no macOS nightly builds. Office Hours met twice—on November 10 and 17—to cover planning and progress for the embedded lld work.
I asked “AI” to write a witty introduction for this week’s Last Week in Pony, and here’s what it came up with:
Welcome to another thrilling edition of Last Week in Pony! This week, we’re talking about embedded link development, future clang integration, and some enlightening Office Hours discussions. I’d say we’re really putting the “link” in “Pony links” with our LLD embedding work! Plus, there’s a brief hiatus coming up next week—even Ponies need vacation time.
MacOS on Intel support has been given a reprieve. This and other Hank Williams inspired news in this week’s edition of Last Week in Pony.