Need help? Not to worry, we have you covered.
We have a couple resources designed to help you learn, we suggest starting with the tutorial and from there, moving on to the Pony Patterns book. Additionally, standard library documentation is available online.
- Tutorial.
- Pony Patterns cookbook is in progress
- Standard library docs.
If you are looking for an answer "right now", we suggest you give our IRC channel a try. It's #ponylang on Freenode. If you ask a question, be sure to hang around until you get an answer. If you don't get one, or IRC isn't your thing, we have a friendly mailing list you can try. Whatever your question is, it isn't dumb, and we won't get annoyed.
Think you've found a bug? Check your understanding first by writing the mailing list. Once you know it's a bug, open an issue.
- Sublime Text: Pony Language
- Atom: language-pony
- Visual Studio: VS-pony
- Vim:
- Emacs:
- BBEdit: bbedit-pony
Want to use the latest revision of Pony source, but don't want to build from source yourself? You can run the ponylang/ponyc Docker container, which is created from an automated build at each commit to master.
You'll need to install Docker using the instructions here. Then you can pull the latest ponylang/ponyc image using this command:
docker pull ponylang/ponyc:latestThen you'll be able to run ponyc to compile a Pony program in a given directory, running a command like this:
docker run -v /path/to/my-code:/src/main ponylang/ponycNote that if your host doesn't match the docker container, you'll probably have to run the resulting program inside the docker container as well, using a command like this:
docker run -v /path/to/my-code:/src/main ponylang/ponyc ./mainMac OS X using Homebrew
The homebrew version is currently woefully out of date. We are transitioning to a new release system that will keep homebrew up to date. For now, please build from source.
$ brew update
$ brew install ponyclayman -a stefantalpalaru
emerge dev-lang/ponyA live ebuild is also available in the overlay (dev-lang/pony-9999) and for Vim users there's app-vim/pony-syntax.
We're transitioning to a new binary release system. For now, please build from source.
You will need to build from source.
Pony requires LLVM 3.6, 3.7 or 3.8. Please note that LLVM 3.7.0 does not work. If you are using LLVM 3.7.x, you need to use 3.7.1. If you are using LLVM 3.6.x, make sure to use 3.6.2.
Add the following to /etc/apt/sources:
deb http://llvm.org/apt/jessie/ llvm-toolchain-jessie-3.8 main
deb-src http://llvm.org/apt/jessie/ llvm-toolchain-jessie-3.8 main
Install the LLVM toolchain public GPG key, update apt and install packages:
$ wget -O - http://llvm.org/apt/llvm-snapshot.gpg.key|sudo apt-key add -
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install make gcc g++ git zlib1g-dev libncurses5-dev \
libssl-dev llvm-3.8-devDebian Jessie and some other Linux distributions don't include pcre2 in their package manager. pcre2 is used by the Pony regex package. To download and build pcre2 from source:
$ wget ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/pcre2-10.21.tar.bz2
$ tar xvf pcre2-10.21.tar.bz2
$ cd pcre2-10.21
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ make
$ sudo make installTo build ponyc and compile helloworld:
$ make config=release
$ ./build/release/ponyc examples/helloworldYou should install LLVM as supplied by the LLVM build server. If you visit their website you will find a number of entries such as:
Precise (12.04) - Last update : Sun, 22 May 2016 19:26:23 UTC / Revision: 270357
deb http://llvm.org/apt/precise/ llvm-toolchain-precise main
deb-src http://llvm.org/apt/precise/ llvm-toolchain-precise main
# 3.7
deb http://llvm.org/apt/precise/ llvm-toolchain-precise-3.7 main
deb-src http://llvm.org/apt/precise/ llvm-toolchain-precise-3.7 main
# 3.8
deb http://llvm.org/apt/precise/ llvm-toolchain-precise-3.8 main
deb-src http://llvm.org/apt/precise/ llvm-toolchain-precise-3.8 main
You want to find the correct version for your version of Ubuntu (the above is for Ubuntu Precise) and the version of LLVM that you want to install. The default is 3.6. 3.7 and 3.8 are also available. The first two deb entries above are for LLVM 3.6 with LLVM 3.7 and 3.8 following thereafter. Assuming you wanted to use LLVM 3.7 on Ubuntu Precise, you would add the following to /etc/apt/sources:
deb http://llvm.org/apt/precise/ llvm-toolchain-precise-3.7 main
deb-src http://llvm.org/apt/precise/ llvm-toolchain-precise-3.7 main
Make sure the lines you added to /etc/apt/sources contains the name of your version of Ubuntu in it. If it doesn't, you copied the wrong lines. Now, install the LLVM toolchain public GPG key, update apt and install packages:
$ wget -O - http://llvm.org/apt/llvm-snapshot.gpg.key|sudo apt-key add -
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential git zlib1g-dev libncurses5-dev \
libssl-dev llvm-3.8-devUbuntu and some other Linux distributions don't include pcre2 in their package manager. pcre2 is used by the Pony regex package. To download and build pcre2 from source:
$ wget ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/pcre2-10.21.tar.bz2
$ tar xvf pcre2-10.21.tar.bz2
$ cd pcre2-10.21
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ make
$ sudo make installTo build ponyc and compile helloworld:
$ make config=release
$ ./build/release/ponyc examples/helloworldYou need to have the development versions of the following installed:
- LLVM 3.6.x, 3.7.1, 3.8.x. LLVM 3.7.0* isn't supported
- zlib
- ncurses
- pcre2
- libssl
If your distribution doesn't have a package for prce2, you will need to download and build it from source:
$ wget ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/pcre2-10.21.tar.bz2
$ tar xvf pcre2-10.21.tar.bz2
$ cd pcre2-10.21
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ make
$ sudo make installFinally to build ponyc and compile the hello world app:
$ make config=release
$ ./build/release/ponyc examples/helloworldFirst, install the required dependencies:
sudo pkg install gmake
sudo pkg install llvm38
sudo pkg install pcre2
sudo pkg install libunwindThis will build ponyc and compile helloworld:
$ gmake config=release
$ ./build/release/ponyc examples/helloworldPlease note that on 32-bit X86, using LLVM 3.7 or 3.8 on FreeBSD currently produces executables that don't run. Please use LLVM 3.6. 64-bit X86 does not have this problem, and works fine with LLVM 3.7 and 3.8.
You'll need llvm 3.6.2, 3.7.1, or 3.8 and the pcre2 library to build Pony.
Either install them via homebrew:
$ brew update
$ brew install homebrew/versions/llvm38 pcre2 libressl
Or install them via macport:
$ sudo port install llvm-3.8 pcre2 libressl
$ sudo port select --set llvm mp-llvm-3.8
Then launch the build with Make:
$ make config=release
$ ./build/release/ponyc examples/helloworld
The LLVM prebuilt binaries for Windows do NOT include the LLVM development tools and libraries. Instead, you will have to build and install LLVM 3.7 or 3.8 from source. You will need to make sure that the path to LLVM/bin (location of llvm-config) is in your PATH variable.
LLVM recommends using the GnuWin32 unix tools; your mileage may vary using MSYS or Cygwin.
- Install GnuWin32 using the GetGnuWin32 tool.
- Install Python (3.5 or 2.7).
- Install CMake.
- Get the LLVM source (e.g. 3.7.1 is at 3.7.1).
- Make sure you have VS2015 with the C++ tools installed.
- Generate LLVM VS2015 configuration with CMake. You can use the GUI to configure and generate the VS projects; make sure you use the 64-bit generator (Visual Studio 14 2015 Win64), and set the
CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIXto where you want LLVM to live. - Open the LLVM.sln in Visual Studio 2015 and build the INSTALL project in the LLVM solution in Release mode.
Building Pony requires Premake 5.
- Get the PreMake 5 executable.
- Get the PonyC source.
- Run
premake5.exe --with-tests --to=..\vs vs2015to generate the PonyC solution. - Build ponyc.sln in Release mode.
In order to run the pony compiler, you'll need a few libraries in your environment (pcre2, libssl, libcrypto).
There is a third-party utility that will get the libraries and set up your environment:
- Install 7-Zip, make sure it's in your PATH.
- Open a VS2015 x64 Native Tools Command Prompt (things will not work correctly otherwise!) and run:
> git clone git@github.com:kulibali/ponyc-windows-libs.git
> cd ponyc-windows-libs
> .\getlibs.bat
> .\setenv.bat
Now you can run the pony compiler and tests:
> cd path_to_pony_source
> build\release\testc.exe
> build\release\testrt.exe
> build\release\ponyc.exe -d -s packages\stdlib
> .\stdlib
You can enable LTO when building the compiler in release mode. There are slight differences between platforms so you'll need to do a manual setup. LTO is enabled by setting lto to yes in the build command line:
$ make config=release lto=yesIf the build fails, you have to specify the LTO plugin for your compiler in the LTO_PLUGIN variable. For example:
$ make config=release LTO_PLUGIN=/usr/lib/LLVMgold.soRefer to your compiler documentation for the plugin to use in your case.
LTO is enabled by default on OSX.
Pony binaries can trigger illegal instruction errors under VirtualBox 4.x, for at least the x86_64 platform and possibly others.
Use VirtualBox 5.x to avoid possible problems.
On ARM and MIPS platforms, the default gcc architecture specification used in the Makefile of native does not work correctly, and can even result in the gcc compiler crashing. You will have to override the compiler architecture specification on the make command line. For example, on a RaspberryPi2 you would say:
$ make arch=armv7To get a complete list of acceptable architecture names, use the gcc command:
gcc -march=noneThis will result in an error message plus a listing off all architecture types acceptable on your platform.