Developing concurrent programs with Pony
Horse Power
© Lead Image © Aleksandr Frolov, 123RF
Pony, an object-oriented programming language with static typecasting, trots down well-mapped paths to deliver secure, high-performance code for concurrent applications.
The still young Pony [1] programming language uses the actor model [2] and capabilities [3] to make deadlocks and data races things of the past. In this article, I take Pony for a test ride with an example application that, once it has compiled successfully, logs the consumption of paint and reports the results in a single line.
Figure 1 revisits the problems of concurrent programming in C and C++. To improve performance, the hypothetical program outsources tasks to concurrent threads that access the shared memory area. Locks manage access to prevent different threads editing data simultaneously, falsifying each other's results in the process, and generating race conditions. Nothing good results when programming errors interact and create deadlocks.
Figure 1: In C and C++, a lock is necessary to allow a thread exclusive write access.
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