ponyc

Pony

Pony is an open-source, object-oriented, actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language.

Status

Pony is still pre-1.0 and as such, semi-regularly introduces breaking changes. These changes are usually fairly easy to adapt to. Applications written in Pony are currently used in production environments.

Supported platforms

• ✅ Released — official prebuilt binaries; also tested in CI
• 🧪 Tested — tested in CI; build from source (no prebuilt binary)
• 🔧 Best-effort — not in CI; built from source and tested periodically on real hardware
• ✗ Unsupported — no support
• — Not applicable — combination doesn’t exist

On Windows, the minimum supported version is Windows 11 / Windows Server 2022 (build 20348). Pony’s networking uses an OS readiness API introduced in that build; earlier versions, including Windows 10, are unsupported and a Pony binary will not run on them.

On Linux, the minimum supported version is kernel 5.3. Pony’s process support detects a child’s exit with pidfd_open, a system call added in that release; on an older kernel, starting a process returns an error. Earlier kernels are unsupported.

Build prerequisites

The standard library’s net package requires an SSL/TLS development library at build time — OpenSSL (1.1.x, 3.0.x, or 4.0.x) or LibreSSL. CMake auto-detects the installed version and passes the right flag to ponyc; the build fails at configure time if no supported SSL library is found. See BUILD.md for per-distribution package names.

More Information

• Installation
• Building from source
• Docker images
• Editor support

Resources

• Learn more about Pony
• Start learning Pony
  • Getting help
• Try Pony online
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Community

Contributing

We welcome contributions to Pony. Please read through CONTRIBUTING.md for details on how to get started.

License

Pony is distributed under the terms of the 2-Clause BSD License. See LICENSE for details.