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Re:Pony – High Performance Actor Programming by 0cachecoherency on Monday May 04, 2015 @02:56AM (#9484692)
That's great news that you know Mark! We have talked extensively with Mark about the design of Pony, and he agrees that it is indeed a capabilities type system, and that it is capabilities secure.
Re:Pony – High Performance Actor Programming by kentonv on Monday May 04, 2015 @03:11AM (#9484739)
Hmm well if Mark Miller says Pony is capability-based then it must be. I apologize if I've misunderstood. I'm confused, though, by two things:

1. Your documentation introducing capabilities specifically says: "Pony capabilities are completely new, no other language has them." If you really mean "capability" in Mark Miller's sense of the word, then this statement is incorrect. Many object-capability languages exist.

2. What your documentation describes as "capabilities" looks to me like type qualifiers. The documentation says "A capability is a form of type qualifier and provides a lot more guarantees than const does!" But this doesn't sound anything like capabilities.

Is it possible that Pony is an object-capability language but you are also using the word to refer to a different concept? If Pony is actually an object-cap language then that's excellent, and I even more so encourage you to rename the type qualifier concept to avoid the confusion!

FWIW, Sandstorm is very interested in adopting a high-performance ocap language, but would probably shy away from one which uses the word "capbaility" to mean something else, for fear of confusing developers.

Re:Pony – High Performance Actor Programming by 0cachecoherency on Monday May 04, 2015 @03:24AM (#9484788)
Sandstorm looks extremely interesting. Very very extremely. If Pony could be useful at all to Sandstorm, please get in touch!

Sorry for the docs misunderstanding - I promise, bad docs not withstanding, we are using "capability" to mean exactly what you want us to mean :)

Re:Pony – High Performance Actor Programming by reallyRaoul on Monday May 04, 2015 @05:49PM (#9489461)
+1 to fixing the docs. It should not be hard to remove the one line, "Pony capabilities are completely new, no other language has them."