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Last Week in Pony

Last Week in Pony - May 17, 2026

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.

Last Week in Pony - May 10, 2026

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.

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.

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.

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.

Last Week in Pony - March 22, 2026

ponyc 0.62.0 is out and you should update. There are bug fixes in there that matter, including one that was quietly breaking SSL hostname verification. Beyond that, there’s a new multipart MIME parser, four new patterns, and pony-lsp landed in Helix. Let’s get into it, but first, fire up this week’s theme song: “Bloody Mary Morning” by Willie Nelson. Bob Wills might still be the king, but Willie is certainly in the royal court. Oh, and be prepared for lots of homework.