 | |
- | new to pike? |
| For those of you who have not yet had any experience with Pike, we would
like to introduce some of the many reasons for using Pike and it's general
characteristics. We will not dig deep into syntax, semantics or other details
(visit the documentation section of this site for
that), but skim the surface first. Seatbelts fastened? Read on!
|
- | what is pike? |
| Pike is a general purpose programming language, which means that you can put
it to use for almost any task. Its application domain spans anything from the
world of the Net to the world of multimedia applications, or environments where
your shell could use some spicy text processing or system administration tools.
Your imagination sets the limit, but Pike will probably extend it far beyond
what you previously considered within reach.
|
- | who made pike? |
| We will not bother you here with the entire
history of Pike, but in a quick summary we
should credit Fredrik Hübinette, who
started writing Pike (at that time called µLPC),
Roxen Internet Software, who funded the
Pike development during its first years, the
Pike development team that continues its
development at present and the Software and Systems division of the Department
of Computer and Information Science (IDA
for short) at Linköping University, who currently provides funding for some
Pike research and development, as well as this site. Also, without the
participation of the friendly community of Pike users and advocates all over
the world, Pike would hardly be the same either; we are grateful for your
commitment.
|
- | who uses pike? |
| Besides those already mentioned (Roxen IS and SaS, IDA, LiU), there are
many other people scattered throughout the world who have put Pike to good
use. Read some of their testimonials and
find out more about how they value Pike.
|
- | ...and for what? |
| Roxen Internet Software wrote the free web servers Spinner, Roxen Challenger
and Roxen WebServer in Pike, as well as the highly appraised commercial content
management system Roxen Platform / Roxen CMS. SaS uses Pike for their research,
currently concentrated on the field of compositioning technology and language
connectors. Other noteworthy applications include the works of Per Hedbor, who
among other things has written AIDO, a nifty
network aware peer-to-peer client/server media player and a distributed jukebox
system, both in Pike.
|
| | | |
- | why use pike? |
|  | Pike is Powerful - Being a high-level language, Pike gives you
concise, modular code, automatic memory management, flexible and
efficient data types, transparent bignum support, a powerful type
system, exception handling and quick iterative development cycles,
alleviating the need for compiling and linking code before you can
run it; on-the-fly modifications are milliseconds away from being
put to practice. | | Pike is Fast - Most of the time critical parts of Pike are
heavily optimized; Pike is really, really fast and uses efficient,
carefully handcrafted algorithms and data types. Visit
The Computer
Language Shootout Benchmarks for more facts and figures on Pike's
performance. | | Pike is Extendable - with modules
written in C for speed or Pike for brevity. Pike supports multiple
inheritance and most other constructs you would demand from a modern
programming language. | | Pike is Scalable - as useful for small scripts as for bigger and
more complex applications. Where some other scripting languages aim
for providing unreadable language constructs for minimal code size,
Pike aims for a small orthogonal set of readable language elements
that encourage good habits and improve maintainability. | | Pike is Portable - Platform independence has always been our aim
with Pike, and it compiles on most flavors of Unix, as well as on Windows
(both ia32 and ia64 versions) and Mac OS X. To see the present status of
how well the stable and development branches of Pike work on some of the
many hardware architectures and operating systems Pike supports, visit the
pikefarm pages. | | Pike is Free - Pike is released under multiple licenses; the
GNU licenses GPL and
LGPL, as well as the Mozilla
license, MPL. | | Paradigms - Pike supports most programming paradigms, including
(but not limited to) object orientation, functional programming,
aspect orientation and imperative programming. | | Pike is Constantly Improving - While already being a great language,
Pike is actively developed and backed by both an active Pike community
and the computer science scientific research community. This means that
Pike will stay the razorsharp tool that Pike people over the world expect
it to be, while assimilating recent findings from the scientific forefront
of research, spanning fields such as compositioning, regexp technology and
the world of ontologies, also known as the
Semantic Web. | | Pike is available via git - To help
you get your hands on the very latest development versions of Pike, we
provide Pike to anyone and everyone who knows his/her way around git. Stay
as updated as you like on recent activity in the repository with our
on-site repository browser. | | You Too are Invited - We welcome
contributions to pike, and it
is our intention to provide write access to our repositories for those of
you who want to join us in improving Pike, be it by contributing code,
documentation, work with the web site or making tools and applications of
general interest. |
|
| | | |
