pike's C interface also looks very good. pike had built-in async I/O from the very beginning. the roxen webserver is built on async I/O. it doesn't fork, and on

pike's C interface also looks very good. pike had built-in async I/O from the very beginning. the roxen webserver is built on async I/O. it doesn't fork, and on an overloaded system it is one of the last services standing because of that. python likely caught up and overtook pike because it had better community support. one downside of pike is that it is slow to start, making it less convenient for quick scripts, which python was a lot better at, so python was more likely to replace perl in sysadmin work where short scripts matter more further helping its popularity.