Pony

Stallion: An HTTP Server Built Different

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 14:00:00 -0500

Last week I wrote about lori and the architecture behind Pony's new networking stack. The short version: your actor is the connection, the protocol machinery is a class you own, no hidden internal actors between you and the socket. If you haven't read that post, go do that first. Everything here builds on it.

Stallion is an HTTP/1.1 server built on lori. Red has been running benchmarks comparing it against the old http_server package. Here's what he found, using 50 concurrent connections:

16-byte response body:

| Metric | http_server | stallion | |-------------|-------------|----------| | Requests/s | 441,570 | 710,416 | | 50% Latency | 106µs | 49µs | | 75% Latency | 125µs | 84µs | | 90% Latency | 151µs | 97µs | | 99% Latency | 1.89ms | 1.45ms | | Transfer/s | 34.11MB/s | 54.88MB/s|

100KB response body:

| Metric | http_server | stallion | |-------------|-------------|----------| | Requests/s | 160,052 | 192,069 | | 50% Latency | 254µs | 211µs | | 75% Latency | 375µs | 315µs | | 90% Latency | 0.97ms | 0.9ms | | 99% Latency | 3.07ms | 2.69ms | | Transfer/s | 15.27GB/s | 18.33GB/s|

A few caveats. These numbers only mean something relative to each other. The server and the wrk client were running on the same machine over localhost with keep-alive enabled, so don't go comparing them to your favorite web framework's benchmarks. And this is actually the best-case matchup for the old stack. The benchmark is dead simple. Turn off keep-alive and most of the difference disappears because socket open/close overhead dominates everything else.

Last Week in Pony - March 8, 2026

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 07:00:06 -0400

This week's theme song is "Tennessee Quick Cash" by the incredible Charley Crockett. No secret meaning this time. I love Charley Crockett, I'm seeing him tonight, and I'm gifting you the love. A big week to go with it: a blog post about Pony's networking future, a massive ponylang/templates release, and the first release of ponylang/courier.

Pony Networking, Take Two

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 14:00:00 -0500

Pony's standard library has a networking package. It works. If you're writing a simple TCP server or client, it'll get you there. But if you've ever tried to build something serious on top of it, something with real protocol logic, backpressure that you control, or TLS upgrades mid-connection, you know where the walls are.

I hit those walls years ago at Wallaroo. We ended up forking the standard library's TCP code and writing our own. That experience is where lori came from.

Last Week in Pony - March 1, 2026

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 07:30:00 -0400

This week's theme song is Rawhide and it's so good, we are gracing you with 3 different versions. And this week calls for multiple versions because it has been a big week:

ponyc 0.61.0 shipped with a new \exhaustive\ annotation for match expressions
Three new libraries hit their first releases
Eight Pony patterns were published
The website got a top-to-bottom reorganization

Last Week in Pony - February 22, 2026

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 07:30:00 -0400

Crank up this week's theme song — Horse Outside by the Rubberbandits — and settle in. Big week. We welcomed a new committer, shipped three brand-new libraries, and put out ten releases across five projects. There's also a persistent HashMap bug fix that enabled json-ng to drop its custom null type, three new Pony patterns, and a blog post about teaching Claude to write Pony.

Teaching Claude to Write Pony

Sean T. Allen — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 07:00:00 -0400

I'm not really sure how to tell the story of me teaching Claude to write Pony, so I'm just going to tell it and see how it goes.

A year ago, every LLM I tested on Pony produced the same thing: a weird Python/Pony hybrid that didn't compile and didn't understand Pony's semantics. I'd ask for a program that prompts you for your name and prints "Hello {name}." Simple stuff. They all failed miserably. So when I sat down two weeks ago to try again with Claude Code, my expectations were modest.

Last Week in Pony - February 15, 2026

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 07:30:00 -0400

Crank up this week's theme song — George Jones doing "Hey Good Lookin'" — and settle in. Read fast, though. It's not a long song and this week's issue is longer than most. We've got thirteen releases across six projects. Major new versions of ponylang/ssl, ponylang/lori, and ponylang/ponyup, plus a preview of what's been piling up in ponylang/postgres.

Last Week in Pony - February 8, 2026

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 07:30:00 -0400

Busy week on the release front. Ponyc 0.60.6 squashes several compiler bugs that were crashing instead of giving you error messages, Alpine support got bumped to 3.23, and seantallen-org/msgpack landed a big update with streaming support and compact encoding.

Last Week in Pony - February 1, 2026

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 07:30:00 -0400

There's a new Pony available. It has a number of bug fixes and ships with a vastly improved language server. We suggest you upgrade soon.

Last Week in Pony - January 25, 2026

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 11:30:00 -0400

There's a Pony release coming next weekend—get ready—there's lots of good stuff in it.

Last Week in Pony - January 18, 2026

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 09:30:00 -0400

Not a lot of visible activity this week in Pony land, but there’s a lot going on and you can expect a few things to land in the not-so-distant future.

Last Week in Pony - January 11, 2026

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 13:30:00 -0400

Sorry for the long delay between issues of Last Week in Pony. Life got in the way. I was down with the flu for several weeks. Then I fell out of rhythm and forgot a couple times that I write this thing up on Sundays.

Last Week in Pony - November 23, 2025

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 20:00:00 -0400

Work this week focused on embedding LLVM's lld linker into the Pony compiler to remove the C toolchain dependency. We're starting with Linux and will move to other OSes later. MacOS CI is blocked by a GitHub Actions "hashFiles" issue, so there are no macOS nightly builds. Office Hours met twice—on November 10 and 17—to cover planning and progress for the embedded lld work.

Last Week in Pony - November 9, 2025

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 11:30:00 -0400

I asked "AI" to write a witty introduction for this week's Last Week in Pony, and here's what it came up with:

Welcome to another thrilling edition of Last Week in Pony! This week, we're talking about embedded link development, future clang integration, and some enlightening Office Hours discussions. I'd say we're really putting the "link" in "Pony links" with our LLD embedding work! Plus, there's a brief hiatus coming up next week—even Ponies need vacation time.

Last Week in Pony - November 2, 2025

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 08:00:00 -0400

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.

Last Week in Pony - October 26, 2025

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0400

We completed our container infrastructure migration with the release of Pony 0.60.3. Support for MacOS on Intel and Fedora 41 is ending soon.

Last Week in Pony - October 19, 2025

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 14:30:06 -0400

We had 3 Pony releases this week and a ton of changes to our container infrastructure as we continue migrating to multi-architecture images and clearer tagging. We've also added new standard builder images for Linux that should cover most use cases. Read on for the details.

Last Week in Pony - October 12, 2025

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 17:30:06 -0400

We have exciting news this week! Pony 0.60.0 is scheduled for release soon, followed by several additional releases to implement related changes. These updates include significant changes to our container images (shifting to musl-based only), improved multi-architecture support for both AMD64 and ARM64, and the first official support for building Pony on ARM64 Windows machines. We're also renaming our "latest" image tag to the more accurate "nightly" designation. Read on for more details about these upcoming changes.

Last Week in Pony - October 5, 2025

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 17:00:06 -0400

Hello! It's been a minute since our last Last Week in Pony. I was traveling and then got sick with "sure feels like Covid". So, here we are. 3 weeks of updates. Let's dig in.

Last Week in Pony - September 14, 2025

Sean T. Allen — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 16:00:06 -0400

Hello, Pony enthusiasts! Time for another weekly update on the Pony programming language. Things have been quiet this week – maybe everyone's taking a break before diving into fall projects, or working on things behind the scenes. Either way, let's keep the tradition going. Even quiet weeks have their place in our community. So grab your favorite drink and let's see what's been happening.