Last Week in Pony - November 2, 2025
MacOS on Intel support has been given a reprieve. This and other Hank Williams inspired news in this week’s edition of Last Week in Pony.
Pony 0.60.4 Released¶
We released Pony 0.60.4. This release adds Alpine 3.22 support and ends support for Fedora 41. You can read the release notes to learn more.
MacOS for Intel Support is NOT Ending¶
Last week, we announced we were ending support for MacOS on Intel (x86_64) architecture. Then I stumbled upon an issue on GitHub where the GitHub Actions team announced a new MacOS 15-based runner that they will support until August 2027, so… we’re keeping MacOS Intel support until then.
A Builder Image Meets Its End¶
We stopped maintaining the shared-docker-ci-x86-64-unknown-linux-builder image. It’s been replaced by the shared-docker-ci-standard-builder image that has nightly and release tags and is built for both amd64 and arm64.
Items of Note¶
Pony Development Sync¶
The recording of the October 28 Pony Development Sync is now available on Vimeo.
Office Hours¶
This past week at Office Hours, we had Red, myself, and Alex Webber, who returned after being away for a while.
We discussed the “read_again” pattern for giving up the scheduler in a Pony actor but then picking up the work again later. I covered exactly how it works under the hood and how it interacts with the actor’s message queue and how actors are scheduled.
We had a quick discussion of object capabilities and how you pass around tokens and how the tokens are implemented and their hierarchy-like nature. We also discussed how you can pass around FilePath rather than a token and use the FilePath to allow access to only a segment of the file system.
We then discussed AI slop books. Alex pointed us to a number of AI slop books about Pony on Amazon. That’s when Red and I learned that at some point, someone created a Wikipedia page for Pony and so far, editors haven’t deleted it. If you know me well enough, this is where you should insert me grumbling about Wikipedia notability guidelines. And insert me laughing at the fact that AI slop books on Amazon might be helping keep the Wikipedia page alive since at least one of the books is referenced from the Wikipedia page.
Releases¶
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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