The Pike Programming Language

https://pike.lysator.liu.se/

by diggernet • 4 years ago

119 61 4 years ago

pike.lysator.liu.se

macintux2• 4 years ago

Haven’t figured out what its value proposition is, but the about page has more details than the homepage.

https://pike.lysator.liu.se/about/

LargoLasskhyfv• 4 years ago

1998:

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3012

The Roxen Challenger HTTP Web Server is a marvel ahead of its time. That's a bold, hard-to-prove statement for a web server when compared to the amazing success of the Apache HTTP Server. Before you stop reading, you should consider that there is nothing wrong with having two subtly different, yet very good tools.

WalterGR2• 4 years ago

you should consider that there is nothing wrong with having two subtly different, yet very good tools.

It's amusing that this needs to be said when writing for a particular audience.

macintux2• 4 years ago

I wasn’t trying to denigrate it: I was genuinely curious what it’s good or bad at.

Every language has a reason to exist, although for many it’s simply because it can.

randallsquared2• 4 years ago

Roxen was definitely far easier to use than Apache, but PHP was a second-class citizen on Roxen, and "Roxen including RXML and Pike" was directly competing with "Apache plus mod_php" (and/or ColdFusion? I never used that, so not sure) though I don't know that the creators understood that at that time.

There were a number of contributions to Roxen's oblivion, to include

RXML was a very high level XML-based scripting language, but you had to drop to Pike to do some things; PHP was a single language that was clunkier than Pike but didn't seem like two separate languages to learn.

Since Roxen started so early, there was some terminological divergence already in 2000 between it and the rest of the webserver world.

Roxen created a 2.x of the web server and RXML syntax that was notably nicer and more modern-seeming, but also much slower for some use cases, so some Roxen 1.x users resisted upgrading -- so much so that when the company gave up, the community-maintained Roxen, Caudium, was based on 1.x, not 2.x, even though 2.x had been out for many years.

From the outside perspective, Roxen seemed to treat consulting or enterprise sales as its bread and butter, in which the webserver was a sort of force multiplier or secret sauce, which directly conflicted with a goal of growing the Roxen user community.

diggernet2• 4 years ago

That's a great question. I know I'm looking forward to reading HN thoughts on it.

For my part, as someone who has only dabbled in it, I can say that it appeals to me though I have difficulty elucidating why. I think partly because it is well suited to creating servers, due to its background in MUD and WWW servers.

forgotpwd16• 4 years ago

It's a descendant of a language used for multi-player adventure games originating in early 90s. Guess its value will be it being a C look-alike scripting language. According to its comparison page compared to Python "is faster, has a more advanced type system, and better support for OOP".

em-bee13• 4 years ago

the key value for me is that i can replace compiled code at runtime. this allows to build large long running systems that can be changed without needing to restart. this is a feature that comes out of LPC which was designed for online games where it was necessary to add new content and fix bugs while the game was running since the developers of the game were the advanced players themselves.

roxen uses that to allow reloading modules. the way it works there is that any currently active instances keep running with the old version, but new instances get the new version. since modules are freshly instantiated for each http request this works very well.

there is also open-sTeam which went a step further to use proxy objects, that is, any sTeam object is a proxy to the actual pike object, so my code will only reference sTeam objects which allows the pike objects in the background to be replaced without my code needing to update the object reference because the proxy handles that behind the scenes.

open-sTeam is not actively developed anymore by its original developers, but there is a copy of it here: https://gitlab.com/societyserver/sTeam and i still maintain and use it for myself. (i have added a half-assed REST API so i can do modern web development with it. (realss.com is an example of that. i can connect to sTeam using vi to update the text content and custom code (which is stored inside sTeam as source too))

besides in pike and LPC i have only seen the ability to update code at runtime in smalltalk and lisp. i am not aware of any other language offering something like that.

BuGlessRB5• 4 years ago

On a related note, I have created the SPike daemon: git://devel2.cuci.nl/spike .

It's written in Pike, is being actively maintained, with roughly the following featureset:

- Meaningful error messages on compiled modules.

- Smart auto-recompilation of modules (mtime based).

- Auto-fallback to last-known-good modules on compilation failure.

- Two classes for module development: Spike.Base and Spike.Site

  + Spike.Base implements a log() and listenport() primitive.

  + Spike.Site adds filesystems, databasepools and a configuration system
    per site.

- Live configuration reload through SIGHUP (no downtime).

- Integrated HTTP and WebSocket dispatch engine.

- Transparent proxy support.

- Auto-gzip compression on both static and dynamic content.

- Integrated and configurable logging mechanism to syslog.

- Completely Shuffler-ised (maximal offloading of communication overhead to pure C and the kernel).

- Less filling: 29KB of source code (single file).

BuGlessRB5• 4 years ago

Another related note, I created Remixml, a descendant of RXML in Roxen, but now Javascript based (client side or NodeJS):

https://www.npmjs.com/package/remixml

tored3• 4 years ago

Good question, perhaps strictly typed dynamic C like language with an event loop and a large standard library.

tpmx4• 4 years ago

We built the Opera Mini server infrastructure based on Pike, starting back in 2004-2005 with a team that initially mostly came from the Roxen/Spinner days (a separate company). I started working there in 97, and I was kinda late to the party - it started out in 93/94.

I still miss working with this language. It just makes so much sense to me.

The way I think of it is as a quite a lot more performant version of Python with a C-like syntax and a much more consistently designed - while still very rich - standard library.

The downside is of course that compared to Python, Pike is now almost completely unknown. The ecosystem is tiny, etc. We really sucked at marketing the language in the early critical days and then after a while kind of gave up and focused on using it to build commercial systems instead.

nerdponx• 4 years ago

Is Go the spiritual successor to Pike?

tpmx4• 4 years ago

I doubt that Pike was on the Go designers' radars - but to me personally, it certainly feels so. Go is now my favorite language.

Who knows though, the Pike language's main creator has been at Google since well before Go got started.

2143• 4 years ago

In the excellent GOPL book [1], there's a part called "The Origins of Go" in the Preface that lists languages which had an influence on Go (there's an accompanying diagram). You can see this part of the book (including the aforementioned diagram) in the official sample at [2] (page xii).

The languages are: ALGOL 60, Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon, Object Oberon, Oberon-2, CSP, Squeak, Newsqueak, Alef, and C.

[1] The Go Programming Language, by Alan A. A. Donovan and Brian W. Kernighan https://www.gopl.io/

[2] https://www.gopl.io/ch1.pdf

em-bee13• 4 years ago

you are not the first to ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944519 :-)

LinuXY• 4 years ago

I have fond memories of learning Pike and Roxen as a kid by perusing the Stellar Crisis source code (released, 1993!) I think there's still some servers around today. https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Stellar_Crisis

xscott• 4 years ago

Yeah, in that same year I was using "LPC" in an LPMUD called "Lost Souls". I think that's a precursor to Pike, but I'm not certain about the family tree.

I had learned Basic when I was young, and my coursework had pushed me to learn Pascal and C, but I really think it's LPC that pushed me towards a career in programming.

abathur• 4 years ago

Yes, I am also under the impression that Pike grew out of LPC (and I, too, really cut my teeth on LPC).

classichasclass• 4 years ago

Another Roxen user by way of LPC (even have the T-shirt!). Back in the day, gtext was the bomb. Nothing looked as good.

xrd• 4 years ago

I worked at Real Networks back in the end of last millennium. They were big fans of Roxen and Caudium. I loved developing in Pike. It was way ahead of it's time for sure.

avgcorrection• 4 years ago

I was sort of curious about how active this community is.

- News sidebar: 2022, 2022, 2021. So it’s not dead.

- “Development”. Stuff about policies and getting write access. Taking legal action if you violate the LICENSE. Wait, do they use Subversion? No they use Git.

- Where’s the repo? A page about read-write access. Doesn’t seem like I can get simply read access. (A HTTPS link is more convenient for me for read access, which is how I access all Git repositories which aren’t owned by any of my online accounts.)

- Issue tracker. Latest issues updated 1 month, 3 months, and 5 months ago.

- Forum is a mailing list. You can subscribe. No web archive apparently.

- There is a graph of lines of code added/deleted every week “since it first became version controlled” (Highcharts). It’s empty.

- There’s some heading “Contributors with a Github account” with nothing beneath it.

I won’t criticize an apparently university-managed homepage for any of this. But what am I supposed to learn from it in this context? Is this perhaps yet another “remember this, fellow in-the-knowers?” HN submission?

diggernet2• 4 years ago

Nah, it's more of a "I wonder what folks have to say about this rarely-mentioned project" HN submission.

For the repo, I found that the Development page has a tab (at top left, doesn't really look like a tab, so easy to miss) named "GIT". That page has links to what looks like a self-hosted GitLab, as well as a GitHub mirror.

tored3• 4 years ago

- repo

https://pike.lysator.liu.se/development/git/

- git mirror

https://github.com/pikelang/Pike

- web mailing list

https://www.mail-archive.com/pike@roxen.com/

But yes the web page is stale, it has been for a long time.

sigzero• 4 years ago

Pike looks pretty clean as a language. Nice.

svieira• 4 years ago

The module system is quite interesting - basically, every unit of compilation (Pike seems to use a file for this purpose) is loadable and treatable as-a-class (Pike calls classes `Program`s):

https://pike.lysator.liu.se/docs/tut/oop/programs.md

em-bee13• 4 years ago

yes, that is one of the interesting aspects of pike (and also LPC). in difference to java which requires class boilerplate in each file, pike just takes the file name as the class name and the functions and variables inside as the class definition.

as a beginner i learned to use inheritance simply for composition, and i didn't even realize that this was supposed to be object oriented programming. it only hit me a few years later when i realized how roxen handled requests and managed modules. i literally woke up one morning and "got" object oriented programming.

btw: generally i remember calling the source class, and the compiled objects program

keyle• 4 years ago

For a moment I thought this was Rob Pike's offshoot baby language frustrated by Go or something :)

Blackthorn• 4 years ago

LPC taught so many non-programmers how to code working games it's incredible.

chadcmulligan3• 4 years ago

Can you use it as an embedded scripting language? Couldn't find anything on the web site.

garrypettet• 4 years ago

Take a look at Wren if you want a similar looking embeddable scripting language. It was created by Bob Nystrom (who now works in Dart). It’s a lovely language.

[1] https://wren.io

chadcmulligan3• 4 years ago

Yes thanks, wren is very nice too, though its at 0.4, I would like a 1.0, though I'm not sure how seriously to take the versions.

tored3• 4 years ago

Interesting question, pike has a stable C API for creating C modules

Step by step instructions https://pike.lysator.liu.se/docs/cmod-step-by-step/

What is CMOD? http://wiki.gotpike.org/index.pike?page=PikeDevel/C%20Module...

Calling pike functions from within C/CMOD code http://wiki.gotpike.org/index.pike?page=PikeDevel/C%20Module...

example https://github.com/pikelang/Pike/blob/master/src/modules/Ino...

I guess it is more of packaging issue of using pike in that manner, perhaps this is something for the pikers to explore. Could be a great way to revitalize the language, the world could need a embeddable strictly typed C like dynamic language.

chadcmulligan3• 4 years ago

There is a need I think, Wren is the only one. Lua and javascript are king of the hill, but both have their quirks. Though Pike isn't on ARM either (from what I can see), so probably a bit of work.

forgotusername6• 4 years ago

The link to the documentation section from the about page doesn't work

em-bee13• 4 years ago

that looks like a typo. the link at the top works though: https://pike.lysator.liu.se/docs/

em-bee13• 4 years ago

previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20366388

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9268778

ur-whale2• 4 years ago

Nice, but it still has semicolons.

BuGlessRB5• 4 years ago

I'd call that a feature.

I hate the ambiguity that semicolon-less Javascript creates (a newline in the wrong spot, and your code starts to misbehave).

em-bee13• 4 years ago

why specifically call out semicolons?

what about braces and c-syntax in general?

i love pike, but the c-syntax is not my favorite part. i am more partial to minimalist syntax like smalltalk or lisp. python is nice too, but still to verbose.

that said, pike at least is really copying c-syntax directly with some extensions, and not just confusingly pretending to look like c-syntax as eg. javascript is doing.

ur-whale2• 4 years ago

what about braces and c-syntax in general?

I miss braces when I code in Python. Specifically because their absence makes code hard to read and navigate.

I've never missed the lack of semicolons, and hate to have to use them when I switch back to languages that requires them.

shp0ngle• 4 years ago

Ah I thought it will be a pun on Rob Pike and Go, but it wasn’t.

The Pike Programming Language

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