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Last Week in Pony - May 3, 2026

This week’s theme song is “Voodoo Child” by Monica Valli. Trust me on this one.

Big release week. ponyc 0.63.4 ships two new pony-lsp features. Signature help pops up the parameters of the method you’re calling and highlights the one you’re filling in. Type hierarchy navigation lets your editor walk between a type, its supertypes, and its subtypes. The release also fixes a link failure on Fedora-family distributions, a multilib crt1.o gotcha, and a match exhaustiveness hole on Bool tuples. The RFC front was busy too: three new proposals and one across the finish line. Let’s get into it.

Last Week in Pony - April 26, 2026

This week’s theme song is from the man himself, Johnny Cash: “Take Me Home”. I’ve been on the road for two weeks and I’m finally back home, so this one fits.

Plenty to dig into. ponyc 0.63.3 ships another round of pony-lsp work and tightens the runtime’s memory ordering on its hottest queues. ponylang/ssl picked up OpenSSL 4.0.x support and the matching builder image is live. There’s also Ubuntu 26.04 support, a new blog post on the design of pony-lsp, and a couple of RFC moves to chew on. Let’s get into it.

  • in ponyc
  • 4 min read

pony-lsp: An Actor and a Callback

Embed You a ponyc for Great Good introduced libponyc-standalone, a static compiler library you can link your tools against, and a Pony wrapper called pony-ast that exposes the compiler as a callable function. This post is about the Pony language server we built on top of it.

A quick disclaimer before I get going. Almost none of pony-lsp is my work. Matthias Wahl built it from scratch. He wrote the actor architecture, the message dispatch, and the original feature set. He also wrote pony-ast. Orien Madgwick has been pushing it forward; most of the new features over the past several months are his. My contribution is mostly fixing things that broke when I imported the project into ponyc, plus a small feature here and there. The clever stuff is theirs.

Last Week in Pony - April 19, 2026

Two theme songs this week. The topical pick is “New York Groove”, because I spent most of the week back in NYC. Apropos. But the real theme song is “Dollar Bill Bar” because OMFG, I love that little damn song so much. You go Sierra. You fucking go. Right, umm, where was I. Oh yeah. Pony shit.

Big week. ponyc 0.63.2 is out with a pile of pony-lsp work that makes your editor a lot more useful. ponylang/postgres 0.5.0 is a security-hardening release that closes a SCRAM mutual-authentication bypass, requires SCRAM by default, and routes a stack of protocol failures to your application instead of crashing the driver. contact-red/sensitive shipped its first release and gives you a clean way to keep secrets out of your log files. And three networking libraries picked up timer failure callbacks so you actually find out when your timer subsystem has fallen over. Let’s dig in.

  • in ponyc
  • 4 min read

Embed You a ponyc for Great Good

The ponyc command you run every day is a main() function with a terminal-width detector glued to it. The actual compiler is a library called libponyc. ponyc is a wrapper around that library, and the wrapper is 149 lines of C.

That’s the setup for this post. The Pony compiler is a library and you can link against it. And because you can link against it, you can build your own tools. And if you want your tool to be one binary instead of a ball of loose dependencies, you want libponyc-standalone.

Last Week in Pony - April 12, 2026

I’m going to be traveling a lot during the next couple weeks, so our theme song this week is Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again”. A true classic. And for a true story: once upon a time I was a young child and met another kid while we were both sitting on Willie’s lap at his 4th of July picnic. Years later, I met him again at a bar in NYC when he came up from Texas to hang out with a good friend who was one of my best friends. Small world, right? Willie Nelson, bringing together awesome people since the time of the dinosaurs.

All that aside, we have some great stuff as usual happening in Pony land. ponyc 0.63.1 is out and has safety-related fixes you need. ponylang/postgres 0.3.0 is a monster of a release. A pile of networking libraries went out that you’ll want to grab. And there’s a whole pitch to make about LLMs and Pony. Let’s dig in, because it all just fucking rocks. Get on board this train while there is still time. That’s what I’m saying. Get the fuck on board. Oh, and Cloudsmith has throttled us until the end of the day today UTC so, sorry, you can’t download any prebuilt binaries until that has lifted.

Last Week in Pony - April 5, 2026

This week’s theme song was pulled directly from the pool of “things to appeal to Sean musically.” I give you “Apocalypse” by The Darts. Man, this one is great. Big week to go with it. ponyc 0.63.0 is out and you need to update. ponylang/hobby threw out its middleware and rebuilt around interceptors. And there’s a whole repo of Claude Code skills for Pony. Three big things and I’m excited about every one of them. Let’s go.

Last Week in Pony - March 29, 2026

ponyc 0.62.1 is out and you need to update. There’s a type system soundness hole in there, a Windows crash that we didn’t fully nail last time, and a bunch more. Beyond ponyc, ponylang/hobby threw out its old handler model and rebuilt it around actors the way Pony wants you to build things. Big week. Let’s crank up an oldie but a goodie, “Son of a Pig Farmer” by Krylls, and get into it.