Last Week in Pony - January 19, 2020

Sean T. Allen’s recent PWL on Deny Capabilities for Safe, Fast Actors Talk is available. Microsoft’s Project Verona is now open source.

News and Blog Posts

Sean T. Allen’s recent Papers We Love talk on Deny Capabilities for Safe, Fast Actors is now available.

Microsoft’s Project Verona is now open source and on GitHub! See the brief overview below, and take a look at their documentation.

Project Verona

Verona is a research language for exploring a new programming model for concurrent ownership. The language and runtime are designed around data-race freedom, concurrent owners, and linear regions. In this model, concurrent mutation is given up in order to provide scalable memory management. This is achieved through immutable regions that may be shared or isolated regions that may haver their ownership transferred. This transfer of isolated regions between concurrent owners is similar to sending objects with the iso capability in Pony. There is no restriction on topology within a region and an entire isolated region is collected when the owning reference is no longer reachable. Systematic testing is also embedded into the runtime, allowing developers to thoroughly test and debug concurrent algorithms.

Pony core team members are very excited to integrate some of the ideas from Verona into the Pony language and runtime. Verona, as a language, is in a very early stage of development and we encourage everyone to learn from it and keep an eye on how it develops.

Last Week In Pony is a weekly blog post to catch you up on the latest news for the Pony programming language. To learn more about Pony check out our website, our Twitter account @ponylang, or our Zulip community.

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AUTHOR Theo Butler Theo is a member of the Pony core team and student at Drexel University. His interests include persistent data structures, programming languages, and writing software while listening to Swancore.

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