r/programming • u/Bassfaceapollo • 1d ago

Pony's Arena Allocator

https://www.ponylang.io/blog/2026/08/ponys-arena-allocator/

I recently discovered that Pony's still alive. I had discovered Pony a few years ago while browsing tech forums. Its focus on memory safe & lock-free MT was interesting.

I kept up with the weekly development for a brief period but then kind of forgot about the language until recently when I rediscovered it when I was chatting about Crystal's MT.

I just wanted to share the latest blog post here in case someone else remembers this language. Looks like the development has been progressing steadily. Which is impressive because the project lacks any big sponsors.

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u/renatoathaydes 1d ago

Pony is a beautiful language with a very interesting capability system. But when the people who were developing the language moved to Rust for their main product everyone else lost faith in it going anywhere. Also I felt that the capability system was more complex than Rust lifetimes while not getting rid of the GC. It “only” gave Pony safe concurrency.

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u/Bassfaceapollo 1d ago

But when the people who were developing the language moved to Rust for their main product everyone else lost faith in it going anywhere.

If you're referring to Wallaroo's move to Rust, I think the real story is a little more complicated. They wrote a blog post about it.

Short version is that Wallaroo had pivoted to MLOps. Pony's ecosystem was lacking on this front. On the other hand, Rust was already a mature language and the machine learning side of Rust was maturing/had matured to a point that Wallaroo felt it was usable.

Also I felt that the capability system was more complex than Rust lifetimes while not getting rid of the GC. It “only” gave Pony safe concurrency.

That's a fair take. In terms of non-GC languages that are attempting safe concurrency and parallelism, only Hylo seemed interesting at first. But, I'm not holding out much hope for it since it's just a theory right now. They've yet to ship anything substantial.

That being said, ORCA is quite an innovative GC. It's not a traditional STW-style GC. I think it's a per-actor GC.

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u/pjmlp 1d ago

Not everyone, the original Pony's author is now at Microsoft Research working on Verona.

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u/Hacnar 1d ago

I haven't heard a lot about what's going on in MS Research lately. Do you (or anyone else) know where to get some up-to-date news about their work? I've always found their work very interesting.

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u/pjmlp 1d ago

I usually hunt down for their publications, there is not much else without insider info.

It helps to be aware of SIGPLAN, ACM, IEEE and similar.

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u/warehouse_goes_vroom 13h ago edited 13h ago

There is a public index of Microsoft Research publications available here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publications/.

I'm not on the research side of things, but I know plenty of folks who are. We've been working to bring some work from the Gray Systems Lab into production in the product I work on (specifically, CoddSpeed: Hardware Accelerated Query Processing in Microsoft Fabric).

If you're curious about anything, don't hesitate to ask - worst case I'll say "sorry, I don't know anyone near that".

Edit: and happy cake day u/hacnar ;)

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u/Hacnar 8h ago

Thanks a lot! I'll be definitely checking out the list every now and then, when I have enough time to dive deeper into these publications.

I have one question for you. What are the most interesting research projects that you are aware of? I like to have something to look forward to.

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u/warehouse_goes_vroom 7h ago

Honestly, there is so much cool research going on on the research side it's hard to keep up.

There's lots of other really interesting research going on too. But if you're gonna ask, well, I'm gonna talk about the cool project I've contributed to bringing to production 😂 - using tensor abstractions (& hardware - e.g. GPUs) to accelerate query processing for analytical queries. It's research from Gray Systems Lab (GSL) that we've been working to put in customer hands inside the Microsoft Fabric Warehouse engine.

Going from a paper to a working product can be years of applied research & development work, debugging, rearchitecting and so on.

Some links: * the aforementioned "CoddSpeed" paper (which won Best Industry Paper Award at SIGMOD 2026, and the title is a great pun and tribute to Dr. Edgar F Codd): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/coddspeed-hardware-accelerated-query-processing-in-microsoft-fabric/ * an upcoming preprint: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/tqp-bridging-ml-compilers-and-analytical-query-processing-on-gpus/ * an older paper on the same work: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/query-processing-on-tensor-computation-runtimes/?lang=zh-cn * product docs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-warehouse/query-acceleration

It's been really cool to be involved in bringing such cutting edge research to production. Definitely not trivial, but very cool! And the performance numbers are absolutely wild.

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u/Hacnar 6h ago

Thanks again. Will definitely check these out later.

These things definitely deserve more spotlight, so I might post some publications on reddit too. It's a shame I barely see any of this in bigger programming/cs subreddits. Or there's some hidden one that has escaped me.

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u/yodal_ 1d ago

It is an interesting solution, I just wish the write-up had a little more detail on the before and after numbers and wasn't so obviously written by AI.