ponyc 0.62.1 is out and you need to update. There’s a type system soundness hole in there, a Windows crash that we didn’t fully nail last time, and a bunch more. Beyond ponyc, ponylang/hobby threw out its old handler model and rebuilt it around actors the way Pony wants you to build things. Big week. Let’s crank up an oldie but a goodie, “Son of a Pig Farmer” by Krylls, and get into it.
As of ponylang/ponyc 0.61.1, the compiler carries its own linker. When you compile a Pony program on Linux, macOS, or Windows, ponyc no longer shells out to an external tool to produce your binary. It calls LLD directly, in-process, using the same LLVM infrastructure it already uses for code generation. Cross-compilation to Linux targets works the same way. The compiler is more self-contained than it’s ever been, and cross-compilation just got a lot simpler.
If you’ve been following along, you know the story. Lori for networking. Stallion for HTTP. JSON back in the standard library. Pony’s web development stack is coming together piece by piece. But a web stack that only speaks JSON is an API server with aspirations. At some point, someone is going to want an actual page.
ponylang/templates handles that.
ponyc 0.62.0 is out and you should update. There are bug fixes in there that matter, including one that was quietly breaking SSL hostname verification. Beyond that, there’s a new multipart MIME parser, four new patterns, and pony-lsp landed in Helix. Let’s get into it, but first, fire up this week’s theme song: “Bloody Mary Morning” by Willie Nelson. Bob Wills might still be the king, but Willie is certainly in the royal court. Oh, and be prepared for lots of homework.
In my last post, I mentioned that the new json package uses persistent data structures under the hood. Every JsonObject is backed by a CHAMP Map. Every JsonArray is backed by a HAMT Vec. I glossed over why, and I want to fix that.
For the first time in three years, Pony has a json package in its standard library. And this one has some tricks the old one never did.
What a great week in Pony! So much fun! Let’s have two happy time theme songs for this week! We’ve got a packed ponyc release, BSDs are back in CI, json-ng landed in the standard library, and there’s a brand new library for building LiveView UIs. This bunch is ripe for the picking.
Last week I wrote about lori and the architecture behind Pony’s new networking stack. The short version: your actor is the connection, the protocol machinery is a class you own, no hidden internal actors between you and the socket. If you haven’t read that post, go do that first. Everything here builds on it.
Stallion is an HTTP/1.1 server built on lori. Red has been running benchmarks comparing it against the old http_server package. Here’s what he found, using 50 concurrent connections:
16-byte response body:
| Metric | http_server | stallion |
|---|---|---|
| Requests/s | 441,570 | 710,416 |
| 50% Latency | 106µs | 49µs |
| 75% Latency | 125µs | 84µs |
| 90% Latency | 151µs | 97µs |
| 99% Latency | 1.89ms | 1.45ms |
| Transfer/s | 34.11MB/s | 54.88MB/s |
100KB response body:
| Metric | http_server | stallion |
|---|---|---|
| Requests/s | 160,052 | 192,069 |
| 50% Latency | 254µs | 211µs |
| 75% Latency | 375µs | 315µs |
| 90% Latency | 0.97ms | 0.9ms |
| 99% Latency | 3.07ms | 2.69ms |
| Transfer/s | 15.27GB/s | 18.33GB/s |
A few caveats. These numbers only mean something relative to each other. The server and the wrk client were running on the same machine over localhost with keep-alive enabled, so don’t go comparing them to your favorite web framework’s benchmarks. And this is actually the best-case matchup for the old stack. The benchmark is dead simple. Turn off keep-alive and most of the difference disappears because socket open/close overhead dominates everything else.
This week’s theme song is “Tennessee Quick Cash” by the incredible Charley Crockett. No secret meaning this time. I love Charley Crockett, I’m seeing him tonight, and I’m gifting you the love. A big week to go with it: a blog post about Pony’s networking future, a massive ponylang/templates release, and the first release of ponylang/courier.
Pony’s standard library has a networking package. It works. If you’re writing a simple TCP server or client, it’ll get you there. But if you’ve ever tried to build something serious on top of it, something with real protocol logic, backpressure that you control, or TLS upgrades mid-connection, you know where the walls are.
I hit those walls years ago at Wallaroo. We ended up forking the standard library’s TCP code and writing our own. That experience is where lori came from.