Why we used Pony to write Wallaroo
blog.wallaroolabs.com
Why we used Pony to write Wallaroo
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Re: Why we used Pony to write Wallaroo
#2Author here. Small bit of background. I'm VP of Engineering at Wallaroo Labs and a member of the Pony core team (many folks at Wallaroo Labs are now actively involved in the Pony community).
Happy to answer any questions here or if you prefer, via email:
sean@wallaroolabs.com
Re: Why we used Pony to write Wallaroo
#3Author here. Small bit of background. I'm VP of Engineering at Wallaroo Labs and a member of the Pony core team (many folks at Wallaroo Labs are now actively involved in the Pony community). Happy to answer any questions here or if you prefer, via email: sean@wallaroolabs.com
Why did you choose Pony over something like Erlang or Elixir?
Re: Why we used Pony to write Wallaroo
#4Author here. Small bit of background. I'm VP of Engineering at Wallaroo Labs and a member of the Pony core team (many folks at Wallaroo Labs are now actively involved in the Pony community). Happy to answer any questions here or if you prefer, via email: sean@wallaroolabs.com
Have been impressed with Pony the few times I've seen it on HN, thanks for your work on Pony and Wallaroo.
I'm guessing that tooling for Pony still needs some refinement, but as things are now what would you recommend to someone new to Pony (e.g. editor, package manager, build tools, debugging tools)?
Oh and just out of interest, did you evaluate Rust as a language for Wallaroo? I do think Pony has the potential to be stronger in certain areas, but it seems like there's a certain amount of overlap in terms of use cases.
Re: Why we used Pony to write Wallaroo
#5Really good post. Haven't heard much about Pony but seems like a really interesting language and like something I could use for a particular project.
Re: Why we used Pony to write Wallaroo
#6Author here. Small bit of background. I'm VP of Engineering at Wallaroo Labs and a member of the Pony core team (many folks at Wallaroo Labs are now actively involved in the Pony community). Happy to answer any questions here or if you prefer, via email: sean@wallaroolabs.com
Why did you choose Pony over something like Erlang or Elixir?
I want to preface this with: I love erlang. We use Elixir for the service that powers metrics display for Wallaroo. When I learned Erlang several years ago, it made me a better programmer.
At the time we made the decision, we were worried about Erlang being able to meet the latency and throughput goals we had. I knew a number of people who worked on Riak at Basho and had a few lengthy discussions about Erlang performance. They felt that we could end up struggling to get the performance we were looking for.
I had never used Erlang for any large scale project and deferred to their wisdom and knowledge.
As it turns out, the approach that we've used to support languages like Python is in process, using C to bind Wallaroo with the other language. This probably would have been more difficult with Erlang as well, but that's hindsight.
Erlang is an awesome language. It has an amazing VM. That we didn't think it was right for us should in no way discourage anyone else from using it.
Re: Why we used Pony to write Wallaroo
#7Author here. Small bit of background. I'm VP of Engineering at Wallaroo Labs and a member of the Pony core team (many folks at Wallaroo Labs are now actively involved in the Pony community). Happy to answer any questions here or if you prefer, via email: sean@wallaroolabs.com
What benefits does Pony have when compared to Erlang?
Re: Why we used Pony to write Wallaroo
#8Really good post. Haven't heard much about Pony but seems like a really interesting language and like something I could use for a particular project.
Thanks.
If you ever want to talk Pony, you can find me lurking in the Pony IRC.
Re: Why we used Pony to write Wallaroo
#9Author here. Small bit of background. I'm VP of Engineering at Wallaroo Labs and a member of the Pony core team (many folks at Wallaroo Labs are now actively involved in the Pony community). Happy to answer any questions here or if you prefer, via email: sean@wallaroolabs.com
Have been impressed with Pony the few times I've seen it on HN, thanks for your work on Pony and Wallaroo. I'm guessing that tooling for Pony still needs some refinement, but as things are now what would you recommend to someone new to Pony (e.g. editor, package manager, build tools, debugging tools)? Oh and just out of interest, did you evaluate Rust as a language for Wallaroo? I do think Pony has the potential to b…
I'm an engineer at Wallaroo Labs and I've been writing Pony for the last two years. We're using pony_stable (which is the primary package manager at the moment) and make for managing builds. I currently use Sublime 3 as my editor and lldb for debugging. I know that others are using emacs and vim as well.
We did consider Rust as there are certainly overlaps in their approaches to safety (though coming from different angles). In the end we thought that Pony would be better for managing concurrency for our particular use cases, which we thought mapped well onto the actor model.
Re: Why we used Pony to write Wallaroo
#10Author here. Small bit of background. I'm VP of Engineering at Wallaroo Labs and a member of the Pony core team (many folks at Wallaroo Labs are now actively involved in the Pony community). Happy to answer any questions here or if you prefer, via email: sean@wallaroolabs.com
What benefits does Pony have when compared to Erlang?
From the Pony side:
Biggest strength would be performance. Biggest weakness would be maturity. I think almost every pro/con I can think of can fall into those 2 buckets right now.
I'm a big fan of type systems so Pony having one is a big win for me.
The maleability of Pony and its immaturity helped us in some ways. We were able to treat it as a runtime for us to help mold and fit to our needs. That wouldn't have been possible with Erlang.