About

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 AB, who funded the Pike development during its first years, and continues to contribute to development.The Software and Systems division of the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA for short) at Linköping University, that provided funding for research and development. Opera Software, that continues to contribute to development. Lysator that houses some of the computers used for development and provides Internet bandwidth. The Pike development team that continues its development at present, as well as maintains 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 (Opera, Roxen, 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.

Download source code 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.

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 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.