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Pike Scripting Language

Posted by michael on from the big-fast-and-hungry dept.

ulrikp writes "The vikings have done it again! The Swedes at Linköping University (home of the cool Lysator archives) have released a new version of their Pike scripting language. It is similar to C++ and C#, but is apparently more type-safe than either. It is interpreted, and runs on many OS's, including Linux, Solaris, and Windows. Check it out!"

2 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. LP-MUD strikes back by Jouni · · Score: 5, Informative
    Just a bit of trivia; the Pike language is based on LPC which was the language designed to drive LP-MUDs, after its creator Lars Pensjö. The language is easy to pick up and robust - I like to think of it like object oriented C with better string handling.

    The MUD systems built with the language are very interesting as well; they generally have a central "game driver" object that handles the game objects and their heart beats with an internal call queue approach. This was guaranteed to keep the world and objects "live" at all time even if some of them failed. It was very common to have new areas being built on MUDs while the game was running, new objects being coded and recompiled on the fly.

    Most of the MMORPG games built today have nowhere near this level of sophistication that MUDs reached back in the 80's. Maybe some of them would do well to look at Pike. :-)

    Welcome back, LPC! We missed you!

    Jouni

    --
    Jouni Mannonen | Game Designer, Consultant
  2. Faster than ever! by Pathwalker · · Score: 4, Interesting
    For me, the big improvement is this:
    On systems with IA32, SPARC or PPC32 processors Pike can use native machine code as byte code. This byte code can then be executed directly outside the virtual machine and give a ~30% performance boost compared to the old byte code.


    Hopefully the last few bits of code in Roxen 3.3 that keep it on Pike 7.2 should be cleaned up soon. The last time I tried running the CVS version of Roxen on Pike 7.4, I only had problems with logging.