Actionscript vs Pony
When comparing Actionscript vs Pony, the Slant community recommends Pony for most people. In the question“What are the best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages?” Pony is ranked 22nd while Actionscript is ranked 78th. The most important reason people chose Pony is:
The unique type system allows the compiler to automatically schedule actors on threads, giving you reliable concurrency for free.
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Pros
Pro Great for light games
Easy 2D and rich 3D capabilities means ActionScript is a great game prototyping or production tool. Relatively easy to get images on a stage and easy to share with it's wide platform support.
Pro Wide compatability
Runs on all major platforms as an AIR executable or mobile app, as well as in-browser as a FLASH file.
Pro Object-oriented
Teaches strong typed habits and follows many conventions of major programming languages.
Pro Large community
Online games and a colorful history means there are a lot of existing scripts and examples on the internet for available integration as well as tutorials.
Pro Concurrency model based on actors
The unique type system allows the compiler to automatically schedule actors on threads, giving you reliable concurrency for free.
Pro Reliable
Because of its capabilities secure type system, provided you don't use the C FFI, references will never be stale, race conditions are effectively impossible, deadlocks don't happen because locks and mutexes are never needed, and processes never crash because all exceptions must be handled. (Barring compiler bugs or external memory corruption, of course.) Pony programs can still lock up due to infinite loops, like any Turing-complete language.
Pro High performance
Compiles to native code, and features an intelligent garbage collector that takes advantage of the actor architecture to get essentially free garbage collection.
Pro Trivially simple C FFI
Calling low-level C functions is as simple as use "lib:clibrary"
and @c_function_name[return_type](parameter:type)
. Linking C to Pony libraries is just as easy, as the Pony compiler will generate appropriate header files.
Cons
Con No future
The last stable release is : 3.0 / June 27, 2006. Adobe confirmed there will be no 4.0, ever. This train has stopped long time ago.
Con Not very widely used
Past its hay-day, ActionScript is reserved for more niche products. This in turn means that choosing ActionScript as a career path is often ill-advised. Exceptions include ScaleForm for UI/UX in games (including AAA games) and light apps and games.
Con Waning support
Un-usable in-browser on most mobile devices, ActionScript is used mainly for niche AIR programs, graphical mobile and in-browser apps and games, and in UI/UX using Scaleform.
Con All exceptions must be caught
The compiler enforces this, so code is littered with try
s.
Con Limited documentation
As Pony is such a new language, documentation is relatively light, and tutorials are few and far-between.
Con Few libraries
Con Garbage collector can't run until you yield
A long-running behavior can leak memory because the garbage collector has no chance to run.
Con Limited tooling
There's no IDE. Debuggers are fairly basic. Pony is too young to have much of an ecosystem.
Con Divide by zero is allowed
And instead of some sensible result like NaN or Inf, the answer is zero! Most languages would just raise an exception (and Pony used to do this), but since the compiler enforces the rule that "all exceptions must be caught" the proliferation of try
s was determined to be too burdensome on the programmer. This makes the whole design of the exception system questionable.
Con Unstable API
Pony is not ready for production. It has yet to release version 1.0, and there are frequent breaking changes.
Con Difficult learning curve
The type system uses a capabilities-oriented approach to reference semantics, which can be difficult to wrap your head around at first. The lack of more common object-oriented features and the preference for simplicity over familiarity can make it difficult for new users to model their program design.