Pony programming language:

• Dedicated to exploring high-performance actor-based systems.
• Notices from 2014, with notable reference capabilities system.
• Designed by Sylvan Clebsch due to memory errors in C and C++ actor framework.

Actors in Pony:

• Programs consist of independent actors with own memory and async message communication.
• Encourages breaking programs into multiple actors for multithreaded systems.
• No global state, all data owned by specific actors.
• Actors have queues of invoked behaviors processed sequentially.

Reference capabilities:

• Introduces six kinds of pointers: Isolated, Value, Reference, Box, Transition, Tag.
• Allows precise control over data access between actors.
• Immutable data passed between actors doesn't need to be copied.
• Runtime system ensures message sending is a synchronization barrier.

Trying it out:

• Includes documentation and tutorials on the website and a playground.
• Suggest using ponyup script for Linux installation (with some Fedora issues).
• Compiler requires gold linker and C11 compiler. Produces a single executable.

Conclusion:

• Not the right tool for every app, best for long-lived parallel apps.
• Driven by a small team but welcomes outside contributions.
• Has limited standard library and not at 1.0 release yet.
• Ideas could be widely applicable with safer and more performant alternative.