pony-tutorial VS ante

I don't think that there is a book written about Pony, but the tutorial and the list of patterns (WIP) are all you need to learn the language.

[Pony](https://tutorial.ponylang.io/): actors, reference capabilities, object capabilities.

Pony is a relatively young but interesting language with capabilities-security.

Well, depends on how you define ownership. Pony 's type system has reference capabilities which let you define who's allowed to do what to a reference and part of it sort of deals with ownership (along the lines of "this actor is allowed to do Y to the reference, other actors are allowed to do Z"). You can eg. have methods that return an isolated value that guarantees that there are no other references to that value, meaning it's automatically thread safe. You can also define things as vals which says that they are globally immutable, refs which give the current actor read/write capabilities but can't be shared with other actors

The alternatives are:

- Division must be impure (because it can throw an exception)

- Division must be partial - i.e. return Option[Int].

Both seem worse compared to defining division by zero as zero. Coq, Lean, and Pony do the same. https://github.com/ponylang/pony-tutorial/blob/master/conten...

Have you had a look at Ante? It looks a lot like a Rust 2.0 with better ergonomics. There are a lot of interesting ideas.

Ante is what you are looking for. It's an ML descendant with no RTS nor AGC.

In my experience, people believe that programming languages are a solved space, and we should stick with what we have.

It's unfortunate; because languages are very polarized today. I think there's a lot of room for languages that are safe, fast, and most importantly, *easy.* Today's languages are generally two out of three.

Luckily, a lot of languages are exploring that space!

* Vale is blending generational references with regions, to have memory-safe single ownership without garbage collection or a borrow checker. [0]

* Cone is adding a borrow checker on top of GC, RC, single ownership, and even custom user allocators. [1]

* Lobster found a way to add borrow-checker-like static analysis to reference counting. [2]

* HVM is using borrowing and cloning under the hood to make pure functional programming ridiculously fast. [3]

* Ante is using lifetime inference and algebraic effects to make programs faster and more flexible. [4]

* D is adding a borrow checker!

[0] https://verdagon.dev/blog/zero-cost-refs-regions

[1] https://cone.jondgoodwin.com/

[2] https://www.strlen.com/lobster/

[3] https://github.com/Kindelia/HVM

[4] https://antelang.org/

[Ante](https://antelang.org/): lifetime inference, refinement types, algebraic effects.