The language was created by Sylvan Clebsch, while aPhD student atImperial College London. His professor at that time wasSophia Drossopoulou, who is also well known for her contributions to computer programming, and as a lecturer. According to developers who have talked to Sylvan, he was frustrated with not having a high performance language that could run concurrent code securely, safely, and more simply.[14]
Memory safety - There are no dangling pointers and no buffer overruns. There is no null but optional types can be safely represented using unions with the None type.[6][16]
Exception safety - There are no runtime exceptions. All exceptions have defined semantics and are always caught.[17]
Concurrency safety - The type system employs reference capabilities to ensure (at compile time) that there are nodata races nordeadlocks.[18][19][20][21]
Lock-free - By design, Pony avoids the need for traditional locking mechanisms, which eliminates the overhead and contention associated with locks.[14]
Concurrent garbage collection - Each actor's heap is collected separately and concurrently, avoiding the need to "stop the world" for global collection.[11][12][21]
There are no global variables in Pony, meaning everything must be contained within an instance of a class or an actor.[14] As such, even the environment that allows for printing tostandard output is passed as a parameter.[14][6]
^Daniele BonettaLuca; Svizzera italiana; Stefan Marr; Walter Binder (2 November 2016)."GEMS: Shared-Memory Parallel Programming for Node.js".oracle. Retrieved10 March 2025.Pony is itself inspired by the design of E's programming model
^Sylvan Clebsch; Sophia Drossopoulou; Sebastian Blessing (October 2015). "Deny capabilities for safe, fast actors". In Elisa Gonzalez Boix, Philipp Haller, Alessandro Ricci, Carlos Varela (ed.).AGERE! 2015: Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control. Pittsburgh, PA, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 1–12.doi:10.1145/2824815.2824816.ISBN9781450339018.{{cite conference}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
MCStone, Maverick (Dec 2023).Pony Playbook: Mastering the Basics of Concurrent Programming. Independently Published.ISBN979-8870768175.
Allen, Corby (Jul 2024).Pony Programming: The Complete Guide to Building High-Performance, Concurrent, and Secure Applications with Pony. Independently Published.ISBN979-8332662072.
