ponyc

It is still developed, although it feels a bit like it was mostly "done" 10 years ago. https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc Quite a few recent commits and their blog/X account mentioned their LSP now being bundled with the language... https://www.ponylang.io/blog/2026/02/last-week-in-pony---feb... Dunno, now it feels like the "hot" thing is either manual memory languages like Zig, Odin an Rust or languages with novel type systems like Lean, Koka, Idris, etc... GC'd "systems" languages like Nim, Crystal, Pony, Go, etc... all seem kind of old fashioned now.

The closest thing to "Rust with a GC" in my mind is Ponylang or just Pony: https://www.ponylang.io/ https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc The Pony community is here: https://ponylang.zulipchat.com/ Pony's garbage collection and runtime can yield performance faster than C/C++/Rust because the compiler eliminates data races at compile time, and thus no locks are needed. It features implementations of Dmitri Vyukov (www.1024cores.net) algorithms for work stealing and Multi-producer single consumer queues that use only a single atomic instruction to read. The designer, Sylvan Clebsch, is an ex-game-developer and ex-high-frequency-trading-infrastructure engineering lead; he knew what he was doing when he designed the language for high performance on multicore systems. On the other hand, you do have to re-wire your thinking to think in terms of

What is this, then? https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/blob/main/examples/echo/ec...

I was randomly looking at examples and I think this is one showing that: https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/blob/main/examples/under_p...

Same impression. I was reading several pages with "Interesting.. interesting.. interesting.. but where is the code?". First code I managed to find was a Github repo with examples [0], and just now trying to follow the click path that led me to it, couldn't find it anymore. I looked up the link from my browser history. [0] https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/tree/main/examples

Example pony applications: https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/tree/main/examples Playground: https://playground.ponylang.io/ They're on HP https://www.ponylang.io/ unfortunately the article link points to /discover/

Example pony applications: https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/tree/main/examples Playground: https://playground.ponylang.io/ They're on HP https://www.ponylang.io/ unfortunately the article link points to /discover/

There are a few, but you are right that they could be more accessible: https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/tree/main/examples (I had the same problem)

Are you sure about that? I see movement in the main repository and the latest release dates to 9 days ago: https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/releases/tag/0.52.1

Pretty easy to get llvm segfaults, I got that with pony also in development versions. The difference to rust is that this happens with rust compiled binaries also at run-time, in pony very rarely. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues?q=is%3Aissue+SIGSEG... => 87 + 291 vs https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/issues?q=is%3Aissue+SIGSEG... => 11 + 50 Now compare that to a safe systems language, e.g. sbcl: https://bugs.launchpad.net/sbcl/+bugs?field.searchtext=SIGSE... => 1 (invalid) or clisp: https://sourceforge.net/p/clisp/bugs/?q=%7B%22status%22%3A+%... => 15

Pony isn't that well known, here's their home page, for the curious. [0] I remember a recent HN comment said that if you create a website for your new programming language, you should always ensure there's a meaningful example right there on the landing page. A pity that Pony's page fails to do this. Here's one of their example programs. [1] [0] https://www.ponylang.io/ [1] https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/blob/main/examples/timers/...

Pony has a playground... https://playground.ponylang.io/ ...but the example isn't very enlightening. Here's a networking example: https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/tree/master/examples/net with the Main being in net.pony and the rest being the infrastructure. And here's the start of an HTTP 1.1 app server (basically, just the HTTP parser at this point). https://github.com/tmmcguire/shetland

There are a number of simple examples in the ponyc repo: https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/tree/master/examples You can find a number of pony library projects under the ponylang org on GitHub: https://github.com/ponylang/

Judging from github contributions and user profiles it looks like the creator, Sylvan Clebsch, works in the Microsoft Research Lab, but he isn't involved anymore. Someone else working at Microsoft, Sean Allen, is the new owner? https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/graphs/contributors Is MSFT involved with pony (that'd be huge) or is this just a MSFT employee side project?