Last Week in Pony - December 22, 2024

docs/blog/posts/last-week-in-pony-122224.md

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+---
+draft: false
+authors:
+  - seantallen
+categories:
+  - "Last Week in Pony"
+title: "Last Week in Pony - December 22, 2024"
+date: 2024-12-22T07:00:06-04:00
+---
+
+<< content >>
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+## Items of Note
+
+### Pony Development Sync
+
+The recording of the December 17, 2024 Pony development sync is available. Check it out on [Vimeo]().
+
+### Office Hours
+
+I wasn't at Office Hours this past week but Joe was. He provided the following summary:
+
+- We discussed Pony's underlying pool allocator, and how it works. Specifically, we discussed size classes, thread-local free lists, and the clever trick it uses of reusing the soon-to-be-deallocated buffer to store the linked list pointer without allocating a new data structure.
+- We looked at Red's solution for calling a C API via FFI that expects a pointer to an array of a C unions using a Pony tuple of mixed members. Joe also proposed a different approach with different pros and cons - in this specific case where the C union members can all boil down to different numeric types, and the union has a 64 bit size/alignment, Joe suggested that Red could also consider converting each element to a U64 and send an Array[U64] buffer pointer to the FFI function.
+- We discussed other programming languages, and talked about the use cases for specialized languages that make more assumptions vs "general-purpose" languages that make fewer assumptions.
+
+---
+
+_Last Week In Pony_ is a weekly blog post to catch you up on the latest news for the Pony programming language. To learn more about Pony, check out [our website](https://ponylang.io) or our [Zulip community](https://ponylang.zulipchat.com).
+
+Got something you think should be featured? There's a GitHub issue for that! Add a comment to the [open "Last Week in Pony" issue](https://github.com/ponylang/ponylang.github.io/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Alast-week-in-pony).