[ggchappell]

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."

[smaddox]

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.