Last Week in Pony - December 29, 2024 (#1036)

.spelling-wordlist.txt

@@ -180,6 +180,8 @@ GitLab
 GLFW
 glibc
 gmail
+GObject
+GObjects
 Goetz
 golang
 goroutines
@@ -191,6 +193,8 @@ Grönlund's
 Groxio
 grrr
 GTK
+GtkBuilder
+GtkButton
 gz
 Hacktoberfest
 Hädrich

docs/blog/posts/last-week-in-pony-122924.md

@@ -0,0 +1,75 @@
+---
+draft: false
+authors:
+  - seantallen
+categories:
+  - "Last Week in Pony"
+title: "Last Week in Pony - December 29, 2024"
+date: 2024-12-29T07:00:06-04:00
+---
+
+A new version of Pony is out. 0.58.8 has an exciting new feature for folks who want to use C based graphics libraries with Pony. We even had to do a quick follow-up release that is of interest to practically no one and only exists to clean up an issue with some standard library documentation not building.
+
+Enjoy! See you next year.
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+## Items of Note
+
+### Actor Pinning
+
+Experimental support for pinning Pony actors to a dedicated scheduler thread has landed in the latest Pony release. The feature comes with a number of caveats. It is intended to be used with C-code that uses thread local variables and otherwise can't be called from multiple different threads of execution. See the [actor pinning documentation](https://stdlib.ponylang.io/actor_pinning--index/) for more information.
+
+### Supported Fedora Changed
+
+With the release of Pony 0.58.8, we switched from supporting Fedora 39 to supporting Fedora 41.
+
+### New Pony Pattern
+
+We've added a new pattern ["FFI Global Initializer"](https://patterns.ponylang.io/creation/ffi-global-initializer) to the [Pony Patterns book](ttps://patterns.ponylang.io/).
+
+### Office Hours
+
+I wasn't at Office Hours this past week but Red was. He provided the following summary:
+
+A couple of people showed up, and I did a walk-through of the work that I've done thus far with Gtk et al. Now that the excellent work that Dipin did with ```actor_pinning``` support is in the runtime, a fully functional Gtk package that doesn't leak memory is well within reach.
+
+What started as a brief walk-through of the package's design, the approach, and the trade=offs that I've made thus far turned into a discussion on API design.
+
+When you have two languages that have such a severe impedance mismatch, is the principle of "least surprise" when it diverges from the original API, or when it diverges from how pony programmers model the how the runtime operates?
+
+For example, when you define a UI in XML and use GtkBuilder to build that UI, all of the C GObjects are created without any pony objects existing. If you need to perform some operation on one, say bind a pony bare function to a button-click - this is how it's currently done:
+
+```pony
+    let button_increment: GtkButton = GtkButton.new_from_builder(builder, "button_increment")?
+    button_increment.signal_connect_data[AppState]("clicked", this~raw_increment_clicked(), this)
+```
+
+The "rub" is that we're creating a new pony object to wrap an existing C GObject. We're not creating a new (C) GtkButton. So, should the function be ```new_from_builder()``` or ```get_from_builder```?
+
+Does ```new_from_builder()``` create a model in the end-user's head that when button_increment falls out of scope, that the C GtkButton would likewise be garbage collected and freed?
+
+In reality, no - as Gtk/GObject has its own reference counting / garbage collection, so when we create a pony object to wrap it, we increment the reference count on creation, and decrement it in _final().
+
+Which means of course that in this case:
+
+```pony
+  let a: GtkLabel = GtkLabel.new_from_builder(builder, "mylabel")?
+  let b: GtkLabel = GtkLabel.new_from_builder(builder, "mylabel")?
+```
+
+a and b have different identities in pony, but the same identity in C/GObject.
+
+We also talked about a potential peer-to-peer pony program and a pure implementation of QUIC for "reasons".
+
+## Releases
+
+- [ponylang/ponyc 0.58.8](https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/releases/tag/0.58.8)
+- [ponylang/ponyc 0.58.9](https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/releases/tag/0.58.9)
+- [ponylang/ponyup 0.8.5](https://github.com/ponylang/ponyup/releases/tag/0.8.5)
+
+---
+
+_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).