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.
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.
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.
This week’s theme song is Willie Nelson’s “Uncloudy Day”. Last week shipped with some brimstone in it, and this week the skies cleared. No releases went out, but main kept filling up, and the headline is that RFC 86 is implemented. The stdlib json package now has a way to turn any JsonValue back into a string.
This week’s theme song is 16 Horsepower’s “Black Soul Choir”, all banjo and brimstone, because we shipped a release with some brimstone in it. ponyc 0.64.0 is out. Three breaking changes, two long-standing compiler bugs put to bed, and the recursive type alias work all landed in one drop. The whole networking stack moved over with it. Red also shipped the first release of a timezone library.
One theme song wasn’t going to cover this week, so you’re getting three, and all of them are gospel. PR 5246 merged. Finite recursive type aliases are in ponyc, and the oldest open issue in the repository, eleven years on the books, is closed. I have been buried in this for weeks. It’s done. So we open with Johnny Cash, “It Was Jesus” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, and then the Blind Boys of Alabama, “Jesus Gonna Be Here Soon”. Hallelujah. It was a glorious week and I’m in the mood to celebrate.
There’s more than the merge. Three blog posts went up telling the whole story behind the alias work, and we put our stance on AI-assisted contributions in writing. An exploratory port of Pony to Haiku opened, which made two old BeOS hands very happy. And the old HTTP libraries are on their way out.
This week’s theme song is “You Wreck Me” by Tom Petty. Tom Petty! It’s been on rotation while I’ve been buried in PR 5246, the finite recursive type aliases work. That’s the big job I warned you about last week. The one eating my coding hours and keeping the Pony news drumbeat quiet. Tonight we ride. Because… Tom Petty!
Quiet doesn’t mean nothing. A new blog post went up on why I pulled documentation generation out of the compiler. Office Hours had Adrian taking a CLI-based LLM tool for its first spin. And I filed an official RFC request for someone to design optimization options into ponyc.
This week’s theme song is “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” by Tim Timebomb. Looks like Pony’s bucket has sprung a leak this week, doesn’t it? It hasn’t.
You’ve been getting a steady drumbeat of Pony news for months now. That drumbeat goes quiet this week, and it’ll stay quiet for a stretch. Don’t read it as the momentum dropping off. The water’s all running into one place — a big job that’s eaten most of my coding hours, more on it below.