(Just kidding of course).
When we went looking at what we should use to implement Wallaroo, one of the things that appealed to us about Pony was that it was a high-performance actor based runtime that we could help mold. We gave consideration to writing our own implementation in C but, we'd still be working on that rather than talking here on HN now if we had.
Pony has gotten us quite a bit. The runtime was used for a number of production projects at one of the major banks so we knew that while there might be some bugs (what code doesn't have them) that we could use it to jumpstart our process.
I gave a talk about Pony and its relation to Wallaroo where I put out the figure of 18 months. I think that as a wild ass guess, using the Pony runtime saved us about 18 months of work to build the foundation we want/need for Wallaroo.
Speaking as a member of the Wallaroo Labs team, it's really nice to have a community based project that you can help mold and grow with. It's been a boon to us as a small development shop in a way that either writing from scratch ourselves or using an existing more widely used runtime wouldn't be.
Speaking as a Pony core team member, I encourage other companies who think they could benefit from a high-performance actor based runtime to have a look at Pony. You could have a large hand in shaping it into the runtime that you need.
[1]: https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-experience-with-using-Pon...
https://pony.groups.io/g/user/topic/on_the_state_of_pony/251...
I'd also like to note that the statement that Sylvan is no longer involved in the Pony community in that post is very offbase. He's a founding member of the Pony core team and still actively involved.