The ponyc command you run every day is a main() function with a terminal-width detector glued to it. The actual compiler is a library called libponyc. ponyc is a wrapper around that library, and the wrapper is 149 lines of C.
That’s the setup for this post. The Pony compiler is a library and you can link against it. And because you can link against it, you can build your own tools. And if you want your tool to be one binary instead of a ball of loose dependencies, you want libponyc-standalone.
I’m going to be traveling a lot during the next couple weeks, so our theme song this week is Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again”. A true classic. And for a true story: once upon a time I was a young child and met another kid while we were both sitting on Willie’s lap at his 4th of July picnic. Years later, I met him again at a bar in NYC when he came up from Texas to hang out with a good friend who was one of my best friends. Small world, right? Willie Nelson, bringing together awesome people since the time of the dinosaurs.
All that aside, we have some great stuff as usual happening in Pony land. ponyc 0.63.1 is out and has safety-related fixes you need. ponylang/postgres 0.3.0 is a monster of a release. A pile of networking libraries went out that you’ll want to grab. And there’s a whole pitch to make about LLMs and Pony. Let’s dig in, because it all just fucking rocks. Get on board this train while there is still time. That’s what I’m saying. Get the fuck on board. Oh, and Cloudsmith has throttled us until the end of the day today UTC so, sorry, you can’t download any prebuilt binaries until that has lifted.
Two months ago I wrote about teaching Claude to write Pony. That post was about the process — mentoring an LLM like a junior developer, building up engineering principles, establishing review loops. Today, I’m here to talk about the LLM skills I’ve been working on. They’re in ponylang/llm-skills, and if you’re working on Pony with an LLM, you should try them.
This week’s theme song was pulled directly from the pool of “things to appeal to Sean musically.” I give you “Apocalypse” by The Darts. Man, this one is great. Big week to go with it. ponyc 0.63.0 is out and you need to update. ponylang/hobby threw out its middleware and rebuilt around interceptors. And there’s a whole repo of Claude Code skills for Pony. Three big things and I’m excited about every one of them. Let’s go.
ponyc 0.62.1 is out and you need to update. There’s a type system soundness hole in there, a Windows crash that we didn’t fully nail last time, and a bunch more. Beyond ponyc, ponylang/hobby threw out its old handler model and rebuilt it around actors the way Pony wants you to build things. Big week. Let’s crank up an oldie but a goodie, “Son of a Pig Farmer” by Krylls, and get into it.
As of ponylang/ponyc 0.61.1, the compiler carries its own linker. When you compile a Pony program on Linux, macOS, or Windows, ponyc no longer shells out to an external tool to produce your binary. It calls LLD directly, in-process, using the same LLVM infrastructure it already uses for code generation. Cross-compilation to Linux targets works the same way. The compiler is more self-contained than it’s ever been, and cross-compilation just got a lot simpler.
If you’ve been following along, you know the story. Lori for networking. Stallion for HTTP. JSON back in the standard library. Pony’s web development stack is coming together piece by piece. But a web stack that only speaks JSON is an API server with aspirations. At some point, someone is going to want an actual page.
ponyc 0.62.0 is out and you should update. There are bug fixes in there that matter, including one that was quietly breaking SSL hostname verification. Beyond that, there’s a new multipart MIME parser, four new patterns, and pony-lsp landed in Helix. Let’s get into it, but first, fire up this week’s theme song: “Bloody Mary Morning” by Willie Nelson. Bob Wills might still be the king, but Willie is certainly in the royal court. Oh, and be prepared for lots of homework.
In my last post, I mentioned that the new json package uses persistent data structures under the hood. Every JsonObject is backed by a CHAMP Map. Every JsonArray is backed by a HAMT Vec. I glossed over why, and I want to fix that.