Last Week in Pony - December 11, 2022
Not a lot happened in the land of Pony this last week, but a lot will be happening soon.
Items of Note¶
A Performance Hit is Coming¶
There’s a performance hit coming. It will be fairly bad at first and will be mitigated as much as possible over the course of time.
Currently, there’s an unsafe optimization in the Pony runtime. The optimization is detailed in the ORCA paper on the garbage collection protocol and is usually safe, but sadly not always.
The optimization cuts down on the amount of tracing that is done when an object is sent from one actor to another. It is based on the observation that for the sake of reference counting, we don’t need to count every object in a graph that is sent from actor A to actor B so long as the root of the graph being sent is immutable. This optimization provides a large performance boost over tracing all objects sent from one actor to another. It also will from time to time, introduce a segfault that takes down the runtime.
Issue #1118 is the most obvious instance of the bug caused by the optimization. The core of the problem is that when an actor’s reference count hits 0, it should be able to be reaped. However, if a reference to an actor is sent to another actor inside an immutable object, the actor will not be traced on send and might get reaped while references to it exist. Once that happens, a segfault is guaranteed.
PR #4256 fixes the safety problem by tracing every object sent between actors. In not very rigorous testing using a modified version of message-ubench, Sean T. Allen saw a ⅓ drop in performance compared to running with the safety problem/optimization enabled. It should be noted that the ⅓ drop in performance is probably the high-end in terms of performance hit and many Pony programs will see little to no performance change.
Our plan is to merge #4256 and then start getting compiler infrastructure in place so we can turn the optimization back on where it is safe. In #4256, we add a new field to all pony type descriptors that holds a boolean for whether a given type might contain a reference to an actor. If it might, we have to trace. If the compiler can prove that it doesn’t, then sending an immutable version of the class inter-actor won’t require tracing.
4256 will be merged sometime this week and will be in the next ponyc release that will be coming shortly thereafter.
ponylang/mkdocs-theme Archived¶
We’ve archived the ponylang/mkdocs-theme repository.
Quite some time ago, we created our own theme for using with the API documentation that ponyc generates (the ponyc --docs option). Our custom theme contained a number of very nice features that we very much like (such as linking method documentation to their source code). However, as time went on, the theme became harder to maintain.
Recently, the theme stopped working with the most recent versions of mkdocs. We decided to integrate a customized mkdocs-material into ponyc rather than continue to maintain the mkdocs-theme.
This week, we archived the mkdocs-theme repository as it will no longer be used.
See these previous LWIP entries for more information about the “new theme”:
- stdlib.ponylang.io Improved
- We’ve “broken” Documentation Generation
- Improved Ponylang Libraries Documentation Sites
Pony Development Sync¶
Audio from the December 6th, 2022 sync is available.
Aside from normal sync business, there was some interesting discussion towards the beginning of the call. It’s a little hard to summarize, so, you’ll just have to listen if you want to know more!
If you are interested in attending a Pony Development Sync, please do! We have it on Zoom specifically because Zoom is the friendliest platform that allows folks without an explicit invitation to join. Every week, a development sync reminder with full information about the sync is posted to the announce stream on the Ponylang Zulip. You can stay up-to-date with the sync schedule by subscribing to the sync calendar. We do our best to keep the calendar correctly updated.
Office Hours¶
We have an open Zoom meeting every Friday for the community to get together and well, do whatever they want. In theory, Sean T. Allen “owns” the meeting and will often set an agenda. Anyone is welcome to show up and participate. Got a Pony related problem you need help solving and prefer to do it synchronously? Give Office Hours a try.
We continued our conversation around ponyc issue #3658, discussing a few possible solutions. With one of these solutions the issue seemed fixed, but the Reachability stage was taking ages to complete so we dropped into a debugger to trace where the compiler was ‘’getting stuck” doing more work. Progress on this issue is ongoing and we appreciate Adrian and Jason’s dedication!
Office hours closed out with some informal discussion around GUI libraries and their interaction with Pony. In the Pony runtime, we do not pin actors to threads so progress may continue from any thread, which makes using many GUI libraries difficult. Adrian and Red talked about a few options for libraries that might be nicer to use in Pony such as T-GUI and SFML. In fact, the latter library already has Pony bindings thanks to stefandd in the form of pony-csfml – which Adrian has contributed to previously. Red is looking into building bindings for T-GUI so as to not duplicate stefandd and Adrian’s work on SFML.
Interested in giving attending Office Hours sometime? There’s a calendar you can subscribe to to stay up-to-date with the schedule. We do our best to keep the calendar up-to-date.
Highlighted Issues¶
Pony is a volunteer driven project. Nothing gets down without someone volunteering their time and helping to push things forward. Yes, there are folks who dedicate more time than others and a core team that dedicates time specifically for guiding Pony’s development. Everyone’s time is limited, so each week, we highlight a couple of issues that we hope will inspire someone to volunteer their time to help fix.
In addition to our highlighted issues, you can find more that we are looking for assistance on by visiting just about any repository in the ponylang org and looking for issues labeled with “help wanted”
If you are interested in working on either issue or any other issue from a Ponylang repository, you can get in touch on the issue in question or, even better, join us on the Ponylang Zulip to strike up a conversation.
This week’s issues as selected by Ryan A. Hagenson are:
Introduction of Empty Ranges¶
We are still looking for someone to implement the latest accepted RFC! All of the details should be included in the linked RFC text. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them either in the issue ticket or on the Ponylang Zulip.
Improve the Actor Section¶
Currently, the introduction of actors in the Pony Tutorial is brief. As the issue ticket author notes, the fact that actors see themselves as ref and other actors as tag is not found. Beyond that specific omission, it would be helpful to have a fresh set of eyes on this section to highlight any other gaps. Someone taking this issue needs to feel comfortable writing learning material for new Pony developers, however does not need to know every caveat about actors themselves. Ryan A. Hagenson is willing to help anyone taking this issue, both in writing for the Tutorial and ensuring all the technical pieces around actors are properly stated.
Last Week In Pony is a weekly blog post to catch you up on the latest news for the Pony programming language. To learn more about Pony, check out our website, our Twitter account @ponylang, or our Zulip community.
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