The Pike Programming Language
pike.lysator.liu.se
pike.lysator.liu.se
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.
Who knows though, the Pike language's main creator has been at Google since well before Go got started.
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/
- 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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
It's amusing that this needs to be said when writing for a particular audience.
Checking more recent comments, it looks like a Holy War has broken out over whether there should be Holy Wars. Priceless!
I don't think anyone would agree that having 110V, 220V, 50Hz and 60Hz is good. Or subtly different railway gauges. Or Windows and Unix style line endings.
There are a couple of upsides too - increased competition, backup in case one project goes in a crazy direction, etc.
But it's silly to pretend there's nothing bad about it.
Though anyway in this case I think "a marvel ahead of its time" is not a "subtle difference".
rails was first released in 2004. django in 2005, laravel in 2011. i used roxen (and it's predecessor spinner) in 1994!! that's literally a decade earlier. i think the only possibly competing tool available at the time was cl-http in lisp[0]. (AIDA/Web for smalltalk was created in 1996, as was WebObjects, Java EE came in 1999. that's all i could find so far)
[0]: at the time i was looking for a better alternative to the available ncsa and cern webservers. i remember ordering a student version or something like that of franz lisp so i could try it. and i was put off by having to write lisp code just to serve static files. that was what made me keep looking until i found spinner.
Yeah that's what I suspected (read to the end of my comment).
the ability to try different approaches to solve the same problem
avoiding lengthy arguments over how to implement a feature
the ability to take risks in the development
...
imagine we'd all be stuck with sendmail or perl.
of course when you get to the 10th video editor it starts getting ridiculous. there certainly are some areas where i wish some projects could join forces to create better results.
Every language has a reason to exist, although for many it’s simply because it can.
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.
yes, this is right, this was not well understood. part of the problem was that the concept of web development frameworks was not established yet. later it would have been easier to say that roxen competes with frameworks such as django or rails, but at the time roxen was promoted as a webserver, and so people expected a drop-in replacement for apache. in fact, roxen might have done better if it had been using apache as a http protocol frontend.
in a sense roxen/pike suffers the same challenge as smalltalk and lisp do today. you can do powerful things in those languages and environments, but they don't fit into the mold of what everyone else was doing. you kind of have to give up your existing ecosystem and start from scratch learning new tools and concepts.
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.
i wouldn't see it that way. anyone who learned programming could see that html/xml/rxml was not a programming language but sophisticated markup.
for some time there were two camps, those that wanted code and markup mixed in one file, and those that wanted to keep it separate.
php favored the mixed approach and python went for the latter. roxen with pike also was firmly in the latter camp.
however it seems that it took a while before the latter approach became more popular and by that time multiple alternatives such as python and ruby were available.
Caudium, was based on 1.x, not 2.x, even though 2.x had been out for many years.
i was part of that team. the primary issue was not performance, but compatibility. roxen 2 could not handle some of the more complex rxml people had created with roxen 1.
the most notable reaction i remember that per hedbor, the primary developer of roxen, was disappointed that we had forked roxen 1 and not roxen 2. he was understandably and rightfully proud of his work. but unfortunately it took some time before roxen 2 was able to achieve enough compatibility with roxen 1 to make a lot of old rxml work in roxen 2. another notable detail is that the fork was lead by his very brother david.
and for the curious, the name caudium came from us looking up the word "fork" in a latin dictionary. we didn't find a nice sounding translation, but there was this reference of a roman town near a river-fork whose name we all liked, so that is what we picked.
> anyone who learned programming could see that html/xml/rxml was not a programming language but sophisticated markup.
Leaving aside the "pike" tag, I guess I agree... my original statement was based on the path dependence of having written my first ever production application "in" RXML. ;)
I'd think that both RXML and its Javascript based successor Remixml are both Turing complete and can be used as generic programming languages (within reason). Which is not to say that creating complicated applications in those languages is a good idea.
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.
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.
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.
- 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).
are there similar systems in other languages so people can get an idea what to compare it to?
btw, welcome to hackernews.
everyone, if you didn't already recognize the nickname, BuGlessRB is famous for being the creator of procmail :-)
With regard to similar systems... Good question. Comparable solutions:
- Ruby Passenger daemon. Almost feature parity with the Enterprise version, except for the "cool robot logo".
- Python Flask framework.
- Apache with mod_php or php-fpm.
- Roxen.
With respect to procmail, yes, indeed, and I picked up its maintenance again, and released a new version recently.
[1]: https://wren.io
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.
I hate the ambiguity that semicolon-less Javascript creates (a newline in the wrong spot, and your code starts to misbehave).
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.
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.