Pony (also referred to as ponylang) is a free and open source, object-oriented, actor model, capabilities-secure, high performance programming language.[6][7] Pony's reference capabilities allow even mutable data to be safely passed by reference between actors. Garbage collection is performed concurrently, per-actor, which eliminates the need to pause program execution or "stop the world".[8][9][10] Sylvan Clebsch is the original creator of the language.[11][12] It is now being maintained and developed by members of the Pony team.[13]
The language was created by Sylvan Clebsch, while a PhD student at Imperial College London. His professor at that time was Sophia Drossopoulou, who is also well known for her contributions to computer programming, and as a lecturer. According to developers who have talked to Sylvan, he was frustrated with not having a high performance language that could run concurrent code securely, safely, and more simply.[14]
At its core, Pony is a systems language designed around safety and performance.
In Pony, instead of a main function, there is a main actor. The creation of this actor serves as the entry point into the Pony program.[6][17]
actor Main new create(env: Env) => env.out.print("Hello, world!")
There are no global variables in Pony, meaning everything must be contained within an instance of a class or an actor.[14] As such, even the environment that allows for printing to standard output is passed as a parameter.[14][6]
Pony is itself inspired by the design of E's programming model
Project Verona, which also borrows concepts from Cyclone, a "safe dialect of C" and Pony, which has key contributors from Microsoft Research
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