Pony is an object oriented, imperative, actor based programming language which makes it easy to write super-fast programs. Its development started as vision in Sylvan’s mind about 5 years ago, followed by a concerted effort 1 year ago, and open sourcing in May.

This talk will first answer the question we are often asked: why is it called Pony? It will then outline the major design and implementation decisions: the type system (which supports data-race free, copyless message passing of mutable structures), pattern matching, the use of LLVM, the implementation of message queues, the application of the actor paradigm to garbage collection, and benchmarks.

We’ll do a bit of hands-on programming to show some interesting features, and then we’ll talk about the future direction of the language and how to get involved.