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by cobaltblue 3809 days ago
Whence the high performance claim? I tried finding some benchmarks, and apparently they used to be on the home page since this was on HN about a year ago, but I didn't find any recent ones. It would be nice to see it compared to, say, Rust, Nim, Haskell, OCaml, C...
3 comments

That's a good point.

But I do see where the claim is coming from. Pony is aimed at the same kind of compile-to-bare-metal that we do with C, C++, Fortran, etc. Furthermore, Pony's design explicitly deals with many of the issues that get in the way of aggressive optimization in other PLs: pointer aliasing, dynamic type checking, data races, etc.

So Pony was clearly designed with high performance in mind. And it seems likely to me that the efforts made in that direction are practical, workable ones.

But that is not the same as saying, "We can write a Pony compiler that generates fast code." And it is certainly not the same as, "We have written a Pony compiler that generates fast code."

Looks like they use LLVM backend, so they'll get low level optimisation for "free". The GC is also interesting: fully concurrent and lock-free.
Well, it's faster than C++ with OpenMP so it's definitely the fastest safe language around. For sure faster and safer than Rust, and it looks better to the eye also. What I'm missing are FFI finalizers and GC triggers as with libsigsegv. Long running hungry actors can force unhandled out of memory.
The grandparent was looking for concrete evidence/examples for the "high performance" label, not just another assertion of high performance.
There's some benchmarking of simple fib type things here [1].

[1] https://cdn.rawgit.com/darach/my_little_pony/master/my-littl...