Pony programming language
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 99 of 163 programming languages by recommenders
A free, garbage-collected actor-based language whose reference capabilities check safety at compile time, with runtime speed that people say rivals C, C++ and Rust.
A free, garbage-collected actor-based language whose reference capabilities check safety at compile time, with runtime speed that people say rivals C, C++ and Rust.
10 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 10
- criticize it
- 0
- approval share
- 100%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 10 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- Nobody criticizes itNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 9 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Reference capabilities catch errors by design
“Reference capabilities provide such a nice semantic lever for thinking this stuff through.”
Comment from 30 Jul 2026 in “Concurrency, interactivity, mutability, choose two” “it seems like it addresses the core concerns in this article by design”
Comment from 14 Mar 2026 in “The Isolation Trap: Erlang” “It's just part of the language so a violation is simply a type error”
Comment from 12 Sep 2026 in “A few good ideas in programming languages” Strong ideas for language design
“would be a benefit to greenfield programming language design”
Comment from 24 Dec 2025 in “Time-Traveling to 1979: Advice for Designing 'C with Classes” “Rust and Pony put good effort in those areas”
Comment from 2 Aug 2026 in “Why Don't People Use Formal Methods?” “there's a lot of stuff in it that I like”
Comment from 10 May 2026 in “FreeBSD: Local Privilege Escalation via Execve()” Garbage collection without long pauses
“GC'd FOSS language without the stop-the-world pauses, demonstrating that it's possible”
Comment from 8 Dec 2025 in “Removed rust to gain speed” “Pony's garbage collection and runtime can yield performance faster than C/C++/Rust”
Comment from 7 Nov 2025 in “Why I love OCaml (2023)”
Other programming languages people recommend
The four most recommended other programming languages, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 163 programming languages, rankedWhat people said
10 of the 11 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Something like Pony[1] is a more mature and feature rich entry and has a much better OOP story.”
“It's just part of the language so a violation is simply a type error”
“Rust and Pony put good effort in those areas”
“Reference capabilities provide such a nice semantic lever for thinking this stuff through.”
“there's a lot of stuff in it that I like”
“it seems like it addresses the core concerns in this article by design”
“Quite a few recent commits and their blog/X account mentioned their LSP now being bundled with the language”
“would be a benefit to greenfield programming language design”
“GC'd FOSS language without the stop-the-world pauses, demonstrating that it's possible”
“Pony's garbage collection and runtime can yield performance faster than C/C++/Rust”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.