Preventing data races with Pony
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The Pony programming language is dedicated to exploring how to make high-performance actor-based systems. Started in 2014, the language's most notable feature is probably reference capabilities, a system of pointer annotations that gives the developer fine manual control over how data is shared between actors, while simultaneously ensuring that Pony programs don't have data races. The language is not likely to overtake other more popular programming languages, but its ideas could be useful for other languages or frameworks struggling with concurrent data access.
Pony was primarily designed by Sylvan Clebsch, who had attempted to write an actor framework in C and C++ while employed at a financial firm. According to Clebsch's description of the motivation for Pony, that system was fast and useful to the company, but it was also plagued by constant bugs:
That experience got him interested in how to do better, and he began a several-year quest to read relevant academic papers and try to synthesize them into a cohesive whole. Clebsch ended up starting a Ph.D. at Imperial College London, where he met other people interested in working on the same problem. They built the system that would become Pony, and released the code under the BSD 2-clause license in 2015, which attracted many more contributors.
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