Two theme songs this week. Roger Miller’s “Where Have All The Average People Gone” and Charley Crockett’s “Where Have All the Honest People Gone”. Mostly the same song, and I deeply relate to both. It was a big week. A cascade of bug fixes in ponylang/ssl rippled through the whole ecosystem, and sixteen releases went out the door.
This week’s theme song is “This Corrosion” by The Sisters of Mercy. No reason. I do so love it, and that’s reason enough. I’ve been at it hard, and there’s a lot to show for it. This is a big one.
Pony might be great but Bob Wills is still the king. Sometimes though, sometimes George Jones comes along and does one of your songs even better than you did, like “Roly Poly”. Just so good. That’s it. That’s the intro. On with the news!
This week’s theme song is Van Morrison’s “Caravan”. It’s a banger. Turn it up. That’s enough. So you know it’s got soul. Does it tie in with anything in this issue of Last Week in Pony? I could probably invent something, but really, I just love to drop something I’ve been enjoying lately in here every week because why not? If I’m going to write all this stuff up every week, I deserve a few indulgences.
This week’s theme song is Player’s “Baby Come Back”. People ask me sometimes how many people use Pony, whether it’s used in production. The honest answer to both is that I have no idea. We’ve never had much visibility into who’s out there. Every so often a hint comes through that someone is shipping Pony for real, and then it goes quiet again.
This week’s theme song is The Shallaras’ “I Put Something in Your Drink”. The Shallaras are two people. One plays drums and guitar at the same time. The other plays sax and sings. Two people, and they sound like a whole band. I think about that a lot, how much a small group can get done. That was this week.
Pony’s runtime has a set of stress tests. They run in CI, each one a program that exercises the runtime over and over for an extended period of time: one passes messages between actors without a break, another opens and closes network connections again and again, sending data back and forth. The idea is that the more you push on a part of the runtime you think is bug-prone, and the longer you keep at it, the more likely you are to shake out a bug that only turns up once in a while. For the runtime, bug-prone means “susceptible to concurrency issues”. And we hammer away at those areas as much as we can. Or try to anyway. That was the idea.
This week’s theme song is Willie Nelson’s “Midnight Rider”. There’s no clever reason behind it. It’s a great song, it brims with energy, and this was a week with energy to spare. Sometimes a theme is just a vibe, a feel. This one fits.
Calling C from Pony is usually easy. You write the FFI declarations, you call the function, you’re done. Sometimes it isn’t that easy: you need to call a macro, so there’s no symbol to bind to. Or you have to fill in a struct by hand before you can pass it in. Or the calling convention is one Pony’s FFI can’t express. C has all kinds of little oddities that don’t line up with Pony. When you hit one of those oddities, it is time to reach for a shim: a small piece of C between Pony and the library. Building it and shipping it has always been the hard part. Not anymore.
This week’s theme song is The Rubberbandits’ “Horse Outside”, and it’s completely brilliant. It’s a man at a wedding telling everyone to keep their cars. Fuck your Honda Civic, he’s got a horse outside. Pony spent the week in that exact mood. Fuck your external linker, it’s gone. Fuck your second build system, ponyc compiles your C shims itself now. That last one came together so fast it just felt good. Pony is the fucking horse outside.