In this podcast Charles Humble talks to Sylvan Clebsch, who is the designer of the actor-model language Pony programming and now works at Microsoft Research in Cambridge in the Programming Language Principles group. They talk about the inspirations behind Pony, how the garbage collector avoids stop-the-world pauses, the queuing systems, work scheduler, and formal verification.

Why listen to this podcast:

* Pony scales from a Raspberry Pi through a 64 core half terabyte machine to a 4096 core SGI beast

* An actor has a 256-byte overhead, so creating hundreds of thousands of actors is possible

* Actors have unbounded queues to prevent deadlock

* Each actor garbage collects its own heap, so global stop-the-world pauses are not needed

* Because the type system is data-race free, it’s impossible to have concurrency problems in Pony

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