Last Week in Pony - July 13, 2025
Catch up on the latest Pony developments! This week we have the July 8th sync recording available, and a recap of our Office Hours where we discussed monitoring and debugging Pony applications, including DTrace support, runtime tracing, and performance bottleneck identification.
Items of Note¶
Pony Development Sync¶
The recording of the July 8th, 2025 sync is available.
Office Hours¶
Office Hours this past week was attended by myself, Adrian, and Red.
We talked a lot about how Adrian could get visibility into certain aspects of his Pony Radio Project. We covered some of the existing functionality that Pony has built in that might help him. In particular, the DTrace/SystemTap support and the runtime tracing that was added in the last year.
We discussed Pony method name mangling. How to build a version of the Pony runtime with DTrace enabled. And I pointed Adrian at the spot in the Pony Makefile where you can turn on runtime tracing.
Adrian was particularly interested in how he could identify which actors were bottlenecks in his code. We discussed the backpressure system in the Pony runtime and how we would be interested in “actor overloaded” events from either DTrace or from the tracing.
We also looked at Erlang’s Observer tool and how much of its functionality is available in Pony, but there’s no nice GUI to pull the information together. Red hinted that perhaps that’s something he might work on in the future.
Finally we ended up discussing metrics and the high-performance metrics library we built into Wallaroo.
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 or our Zulip community.
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