About Pony¶

How’d Pony come to be?¶

Why’s it called “Pony”?¶

Interesting question. We hear that a lot. If you read enough of “An Early History of Pony”, you’ll get your answer.

What makes Pony different?¶

How is Pony different than Erlang/Elixir?¶

The answer is deep and complicated. Fortunately, Scott Fritchie went to a great deal of trouble answering it in his talk The wide world of almost-actors: comparing the Pony to BEAM languages.

Why would I use Pony instead of language X?¶

That’s a hard question to answer. Language X is probably very compelling for some problems. It’s probably less compelling for others. Such is computers. In the end, the best we can do is tell you what Pony is good at and you can make the decision for yourself. To learn more about Pony, we suggest checking out the “Why Pony” section of the website. Hopefully, it answers your question.

Where can I find the Pony roadmap?¶

There is no official roadmap. Pony is a volunteer driven project. Unlike many programming languages, we don’t have corporate backing. Our users add features and fix issues based on their needs. Pony users solve the problems that matter to them, and we all benefit.

Many of us who are regular contributors share some general goals as we move towards an official 1.0 release. We are working towards making Pony a stable, rock-solid platform for writing high-performance, concurrent applications.

We invite you to join our small but growing community and help push Pony forward. We’re still at an early stage, and new community members can have a huge influence on the language. Join us!

Are there any examples of something complex built in Pony?¶

Yes! Here’s a few projects we regularly point people towards:

Jylis - A distributed in-memory database for Conflict-free Replicated Data Types
Novitiate - A procedurally generated RPG inspired by Rogue and written in Pony.
Wallaroo - Distributed Stream Processor written in Pony

Note, we can’t promise that any of the projects have been updated recently or that they compile with the most recent versions of the Pony compiler.