Is Pony still an actively developed language? I remember watching several talks while they brought the language up to release, and read several of the accompanying papers. However, I thought with the primary corporate sponsor dropping the language it had gone basically EOL. Which was a pretty large bummer as I was very interested to see how the reference capability model of permissions and control worked at large scale for concurrency control and management (as well as its potential application to other domains).
Dunno, now it feels like the "hot" thing is either manual memory languages like Zig, Odin an Rust or languages with novel type systems like Lean, Koka, Idris, etc... GC'd "systems" languages like Nim, Crystal, Pony, Go, etc... all seem kind of old fashioned now.
Go seems to have some enduring affection and popularity for new projects and companies. I recently felt like a lot of the recent shift was less about GC and more about runtime characteristics (static binaries, lean resource consumption, lack of an in-your-face virtual machine).
It never felt like Nim, Pony, or Crystal were ever that popular that a diminished hype cycle registered as something thematic to me (not that I really intend to disagree with your perspective here).
Is Pony still an actively developed language? I remember watching several talks while they brought the language up to release, and read several of the accompanying papers. However, I thought with the primary corporate sponsor dropping the language it had gone basically EOL. Which was a pretty large bummer as I was very interested to see how the reference capability model of permissions and control worked at large scale for concurrency control and management (as well as its potential application to other domains).
It is still developed, although it feels a bit like it was mostly "done" 10 years ago.
https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc
Quite a few recent commits and their blog/X account mentioned their LSP now being bundled with the language...
https://www.ponylang.io/blog/2026/02/last-week-in-pony---feb...
Dunno, now it feels like the "hot" thing is either manual memory languages like Zig, Odin an Rust or languages with novel type systems like Lean, Koka, Idris, etc... GC'd "systems" languages like Nim, Crystal, Pony, Go, etc... all seem kind of old fashioned now.
Go seems to have some enduring affection and popularity for new projects and companies. I recently felt like a lot of the recent shift was less about GC and more about runtime characteristics (static binaries, lean resource consumption, lack of an in-your-face virtual machine).
It never felt like Nim, Pony, or Crystal were ever that popular that a diminished hype cycle registered as something thematic to me (not that I really intend to disagree with your perspective here).
D language is also supporting actor model in the standard library for its concurrent, parallel and distributed programming [1].
[1] D (programming language):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(programming_language)
Mandatory mention of notable actor languages: