6 ms·

IRCd service (2024)

118 points by pabs3 1y ago

neilv 1y ago
> it's made with gawk. gawk is always best when served live. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXHuygyyulE&t=53s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXHuygyyulE&t=53s
epistasis 1y ago
A couple decades ago I remember somebody using awk in programming competitions, as a stunt, and doing surprisingly well. For tasks involving text processing it has a huge advantage, and it ends up doing ok with other stuff.
- ajross 1y ago
  What I always point out though is the bathtub curve of that perception. Awk started life as a unique, weird, but extremely clever and expressive environment with which you could do tricks that were impractical anywhere else. And that's sort of back where it is now. But for a solid decade and a half, awk was a forgotten dinosaur that no one cared about. Because in the era where Everyone Knew Perl, awk had no home. Perl was awk but bigger and better. But now all us perl nuts have moved on or gone silent, all the kids are writing code for node or python or whatnot, and No One Knows Perl. And in a world where no one knows perl, awk looks clever again.
  - sanskarix 1y ago
    The whole Perl era shaped so much of how we think about text processing. It's funny how tools cycle - awk is "new" again because we forgot the middle chapter. Same thing is happening with Rust vs C - people rediscovering memory safety like it's a fresh idea.
  - rtpg 1y ago
    Does perl have an awk-y mode? Or is this just "perl has a bunch of regex-y things to make everything flow well".
    - shawn_w 1y ago
      It has options to split up input into fields and loop over every line for one-liners, yeah. For a trivial example, awk '{ print $2 }' foo.txt becomes perl -lane 'print $F[1]' foo.txt I'm one of those people who out off learning awk for a decade+ because I knew perl, but when I finally picked it up I found it's often simpler and cleaner. I still switch to perl for complicated processing but awk can get a lot done.
    - ajross 1y ago
      As mentioned it actually does have modes that assume various loops over the input. But it also has a bunch of syntax that naturally lends itself to that kind of very-narrow-text-dsl kind of code. Things like implicit variables, "postfix if", BEGIN/END blocks, all make awk-like just as easy to express as in awk. And then you add on top of that a much more capable base engine (despite awk's reliance on regex matching, it's still stuck with regular unix extended expressions) and library ecosystem. Again, in 1998, in the early perl 5 era, you'd be looked at as a nut if you seriously tried to argue for doing some new tool in awk, even a tiny script. Everything worked better in perl.
- pram 1y ago
  I’ve had people be very confused and perplexed when I told them awk is a programming language in the past lol. Most seem to think it’s solely a tool like sort or uniq etc
- busfahrer 1y ago
  I have only dabbled in AWK, but I love the book "The AWK Programming Language" by its authors. Its a great read for any programmer, highlighting pragmatic techniques to solve real-world problems.
  - Y_Y 1y ago
    Many books are by their authors, though perhaps fewer nowadays. As many already know, the authors of that book and the related eponymous language are; Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan.
keyle 1y ago
That's funny, and totally not what awk was designed for, but it does it anyway!
- Blahagun 1y ago
  It's exactly what it was designed for - text processing! Which fits perfectly for the irc protocol.
  - keyle 1y ago
    Awk was designed for one liners and short programs, not tons of lines. See talks by its designers.
nurettin 1y ago
Early 2000s, writing your own client to join freenode was a programmer's rite. Sad to see the network implode. And no, I won't use libera or whatever.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  > And no, I won't use libera or whatever. Any special reason? AFAIK, it's effectively the same network run by the same people, just under a different name.
  - ares623 1y ago
    One letter too close to the L-word /s
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- Malcolmlisk 1y ago
  How and why did it implode? I always have a feeling of wanting to go back to basic chat rooms for linux and all but today it´s more like a chore than anything else.
  - self 1y ago
    A summary: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af497409#ok-so-whats-going-on https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4...
  - Kim_Bruning 1y ago
    The name freenode went away, but the actual operators moved over -> https://libera.chat/ https://libera.chat/ . So you can still join!
userbinator 1y ago
I've heard IRC servers jokingly referred to as "layer 7 multicast routers."
- RiverCrochet 1y ago
  It's not terribly far from the truth. IRC is a pretty thin layer on top of a generic TCP server. On your classic ircds the notion of users and channels is about the minimum possible, and everything's tightly coupled to the network and DNS. Single-core servers back in the day could and did handle 10,000 active users.
  - FireBeyond 1y ago
    Bandwidth was most commonly the issue. Monash University in Australia ran a part time EFnet server back in the mid 90s. It had to be turned off during the day because it would saturate the university's internet connection (and this is even before DoS's became all the rage).
stevekemp 1y ago
Sadly it seems like it is down Connected to example.fi. Escape character is '^]'. /home/example/services/ircd/ircd.sh: fork: retry: Resource temporarily unavailable
- dnel 1y ago
  As is the gopher service, which is a shame.
  - example_fi 1y ago
    Up and running. Seems that the Gophernicus didn't appreciate the ten thousand awks reserving all the available memory.. If you have any ideas of the content I should push there, let me know.
- example_fi 1y ago
  Thanks for the bug report. Should be ok now! This awk contraption is launched by inetd, and there's not much of any kind of sanity checks for anything. As a result, there was around ten thousand processes running :) And also, thanks for showing interest. I'll push the source code on the website on the weekend.
jsmailes 1y ago
Seeing hexchat always gives me a pang of nostalgia for hours spent as a teen on various IRC channels. I know that even if I went back to some of those servers I wouldn't be able to recapture the same "magic" since it was primarily the people there (and besides, those people are largely reachable on slightly more modern services these days), but I do miss the simplicity of IRC as a protocol and the massive variety of clients and interfaces. Maybe matrix will recapture some of that platform-agnosticism? I haven't used it in a while and the general sentiment around the protocol seems vaguely negative these days (at least in channels like HN).
- pabs3 1y ago
  IRC is still around. HexChat is unmaintained, but still works for now.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    irssi is still maintained. :P
    - jooize 1y ago
      WeeChat supremacy! (I kinda miss irssi…)
    - kgwxd 1y ago
      "-nocap" Maybe that's how we get the new generation into IRC!
      - johnisgood 1y ago
        Hahah, yeah for sure! Nocap!
- Arathorn 1y ago
  the main complaints against Matrix atm seems to be that we have made heavy weather of the migration from 1.0 to 2.0 (“either you get a slow client or a fast but incomplete client”)… or that Element has had to focus on building stuff for govts rather than irc-style communities in order to get sustainable. (see also https://gist.github.com/ara4n/190ad712965d0f06e17f508d1a45b554 https://gist.github.com/ara4n/190ad712965d0f06e17f508d1a45b5...). Both problems could be much worse, and we had the annual Matrix Conference a few weeks ago which was a great success (https://element.io/blog/the-matrix-conference-a-seminal-moment-for-matrix/ https://element.io/blog/the-matrix-conference-a-seminal-mome...), so I suspect/hope the negative sentiment will pass.
qudat 1y ago
IRC is having its second wind as far as I can tell. Libera is very active and it offers an experience that is unlike the over-stimulating chat apps like discord. Some projects have both a discord and an IRC channel and when you compare the two chats the conversations are wildly different — IRC being a more focused, on topic chat without floods of gifs, emojis, and off-topic channels. The hardest part about using IRC is getting chat history and mobile notifications. As part of https://pico.sh https://pico.sh we run a soju bouncer (soju.im) for our members to use to help with that. We have a bunch of daily active users.
- sho_hn 1y ago
  Discord has some structures and dynamics that really work against it for the sort of communities IRC excels at. The standard Discord experience has you look for and join a "server", each of which is meant to feel like distinct island. This has every server duplicate the same set of boilerplate #general, #off-topic etc. channels, as if there are no others. As a result the vast majority of servers are fairly dead and barren, the userbase is spread too thin. Also because the UX makes switching between servers a fairly heavy context switch, so monitoring this deluge of channels is not fun and nobody can stay on top of all of their servers. I once looked around for maker-y/electronics Discords, and joined probably 7-8, and they were all dead. ##electronics on Libera is highly active.
  - anilakar 1y ago
    > deluge of channels Also, once you create a channel in Discord you cannot get rid of it without destroying chat history. With IRC, you just /part without disrupting other people and even then you can go back and read chat logs, nicely persisted on your local disc as text files.
    - pavel_lishin 1y ago
      > Also, once you create a channel in Discord you cannot get rid of it without destroying chat history. This is true; the closest thing you can do is collapse the category that channels are in, and mute the ones you don't want to show up. Any new conversation in a channel will pop them out.
globular-toast 1y ago
This doesn't seem interesting without the code, which I can't find. They said it will be available when "ready". Is it ready yet?
dgl 1y ago
Given the source isn't released, how about an IRCd in bash: https://github.com/dgl/bash-ircd https://github.com/dgl/bash-ircd
vcanales 1y ago
Which channels should we join? Feeling lonely
javanissen 1y ago
I am such a fan of minimal, text-forward, straight to the point website designs like this. I feel like it makes it easier to quickly determine whether the text content is worth reading.
nightmonkey 1y ago
https://libera.chat https://libera.chat is what Freenode turned into after Freenode imploded. Really great communities there - F/OSS-centric, yes, but there are good unofficial channels for cloud services, and even some proprietary software and services, like vscode, AWS, Azure, Oracle, etc. ZNC is an excellent way to keep history between your IRC sessions: https://github.com/znc/znc https://github.com/znc/znc And WeeChat is an excellent companion to ZNC and libera.chat: https://github.com/weechat/weechat https://github.com/weechat/weechat And IRC for Android is an excellent IRC client that also plays well with ZNC: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.countercultured.irc4android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.countercul... Cheers!
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
anthk 1y ago
Also, a gemini browser written in AWK: https://github.com/leovilok/gem.awk https://github.com/leovilok/gem.awk It needs OpenSSL or LibreSSL in order to create network connections.

IRCd service (2024)

118 points by pabs3 1y ago

> it's made with gawk. gawk is always best when served live. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXHuygyyulE&t=53s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXHuygyyulE&t=53s

epistasis 1y ago

A couple decades ago I remember somebody using awk in programming competitions, as a stunt, and doing surprisingly well. For tasks involving text processing it has a huge advantage, and it ends up doing ok with other stuff.

ajross 1y ago
What I always point out though is the bathtub curve of that perception. Awk started life as a unique, weird, but extremely clever and expressive environment with which you could do tricks that were impractical anywhere else. And that's sort of back where it is now. But for a solid decade and a half, awk was a forgotten dinosaur that no one cared about. Because in the era where Everyone Knew Perl, awk had no home. Perl was awk but bigger and better. But now all us perl nuts have moved on or gone silent, all the kids are writing code for node or python or whatnot, and No One Knows Perl. And in a world where no one knows perl, awk looks clever again.
- sanskarix 1y ago
  The whole Perl era shaped so much of how we think about text processing. It's funny how tools cycle - awk is "new" again because we forgot the middle chapter. Same thing is happening with Rust vs C - people rediscovering memory safety like it's a fresh idea.
- rtpg 1y ago
  Does perl have an awk-y mode? Or is this just "perl has a bunch of regex-y things to make everything flow well".
  - shawn_w 1y ago
    It has options to split up input into fields and loop over every line for one-liners, yeah. For a trivial example, awk '{ print $2 }' foo.txt becomes perl -lane 'print $F[1]' foo.txt I'm one of those people who out off learning awk for a decade+ because I knew perl, but when I finally picked it up I found it's often simpler and cleaner. I still switch to perl for complicated processing but awk can get a lot done.
  - ajross 1y ago
    As mentioned it actually does have modes that assume various loops over the input. But it also has a bunch of syntax that naturally lends itself to that kind of very-narrow-text-dsl kind of code. Things like implicit variables, "postfix if", BEGIN/END blocks, all make awk-like just as easy to express as in awk. And then you add on top of that a much more capable base engine (despite awk's reliance on regex matching, it's still stuck with regular unix extended expressions) and library ecosystem. Again, in 1998, in the early perl 5 era, you'd be looked at as a nut if you seriously tried to argue for doing some new tool in awk, even a tiny script. Everything worked better in perl.
pram 1y ago
I’ve had people be very confused and perplexed when I told them awk is a programming language in the past lol. Most seem to think it’s solely a tool like sort or uniq etc
busfahrer 1y ago
I have only dabbled in AWK, but I love the book "The AWK Programming Language" by its authors. Its a great read for any programmer, highlighting pragmatic techniques to solve real-world problems.
- Y_Y 1y ago
  Many books are by their authors, though perhaps fewer nowadays. As many already know, the authors of that book and the related eponymous language are; Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan.

keyle 1y ago

That's funny, and totally not what awk was designed for, but it does it anyway!

Blahagun 1y ago
It's exactly what it was designed for - text processing! Which fits perfectly for the irc protocol.
- keyle 1y ago
  Awk was designed for one liners and short programs, not tons of lines. See talks by its designers.

nurettin 1y ago

Early 2000s, writing your own client to join freenode was a programmer's rite. Sad to see the network implode. And no, I won't use libera or whatever.

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
> And no, I won't use libera or whatever. Any special reason? AFAIK, it's effectively the same network run by the same people, just under a different name.
- ares623 1y ago
  One letter too close to the L-word /s
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
Malcolmlisk 1y ago
How and why did it implode? I always have a feeling of wanting to go back to basic chat rooms for linux and all but today it´s more like a chore than anything else.
- self 1y ago
  A summary: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af497409#ok-so-whats-going-on https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4...
- Kim_Bruning 1y ago
  The name freenode went away, but the actual operators moved over -> https://libera.chat/ https://libera.chat/ . So you can still join!

userbinator 1y ago

I've heard IRC servers jokingly referred to as "layer 7 multicast routers."

RiverCrochet 1y ago
It's not terribly far from the truth. IRC is a pretty thin layer on top of a generic TCP server. On your classic ircds the notion of users and channels is about the minimum possible, and everything's tightly coupled to the network and DNS. Single-core servers back in the day could and did handle 10,000 active users.
- FireBeyond 1y ago
  Bandwidth was most commonly the issue. Monash University in Australia ran a part time EFnet server back in the mid 90s. It had to be turned off during the day because it would saturate the university's internet connection (and this is even before DoS's became all the rage).

stevekemp 1y ago

Sadly it seems like it is down Connected to example.fi. Escape character is '^]'. /home/example/services/ircd/ircd.sh: fork: retry: Resource temporarily unavailable

dnel 1y ago
As is the gopher service, which is a shame.
- example_fi 1y ago
  Up and running. Seems that the Gophernicus didn't appreciate the ten thousand awks reserving all the available memory.. If you have any ideas of the content I should push there, let me know.
example_fi 1y ago
Thanks for the bug report. Should be ok now! This awk contraption is launched by inetd, and there's not much of any kind of sanity checks for anything. As a result, there was around ten thousand processes running :) And also, thanks for showing interest. I'll push the source code on the website on the weekend.

jsmailes 1y ago

Seeing hexchat always gives me a pang of nostalgia for hours spent as a teen on various IRC channels. I know that even if I went back to some of those servers I wouldn't be able to recapture the same "magic" since it was primarily the people there (and besides, those people are largely reachable on slightly more modern services these days), but I do miss the simplicity of IRC as a protocol and the massive variety of clients and interfaces. Maybe matrix will recapture some of that platform-agnosticism? I haven't used it in a while and the general sentiment around the protocol seems vaguely negative these days (at least in channels like HN).

pabs3 1y ago
IRC is still around. HexChat is unmaintained, but still works for now.
- johnisgood 1y ago
  irssi is still maintained. :P
  - jooize 1y ago
    WeeChat supremacy! (I kinda miss irssi…)
  - kgwxd 1y ago
    "-nocap" Maybe that's how we get the new generation into IRC!
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      Hahah, yeah for sure! Nocap!
Arathorn 1y ago
the main complaints against Matrix atm seems to be that we have made heavy weather of the migration from 1.0 to 2.0 (“either you get a slow client or a fast but incomplete client”)… or that Element has had to focus on building stuff for govts rather than irc-style communities in order to get sustainable. (see also https://gist.github.com/ara4n/190ad712965d0f06e17f508d1a45b554 https://gist.github.com/ara4n/190ad712965d0f06e17f508d1a45b5...). Both problems could be much worse, and we had the annual Matrix Conference a few weeks ago which was a great success (https://element.io/blog/the-matrix-conference-a-seminal-moment-for-matrix/ https://element.io/blog/the-matrix-conference-a-seminal-mome...), so I suspect/hope the negative sentiment will pass.

qudat 1y ago

IRC is having its second wind as far as I can tell. Libera is very active and it offers an experience that is unlike the over-stimulating chat apps like discord. Some projects have both a discord and an IRC channel and when you compare the two chats the conversations are wildly different — IRC being a more focused, on topic chat without floods of gifs, emojis, and off-topic channels. The hardest part about using IRC is getting chat history and mobile notifications. As part of https://pico.sh https://pico.sh we run a soju bouncer (soju.im) for our members to use to help with that. We have a bunch of daily active users.

sho_hn 1y ago
Discord has some structures and dynamics that really work against it for the sort of communities IRC excels at. The standard Discord experience has you look for and join a "server", each of which is meant to feel like distinct island. This has every server duplicate the same set of boilerplate #general, #off-topic etc. channels, as if there are no others. As a result the vast majority of servers are fairly dead and barren, the userbase is spread too thin. Also because the UX makes switching between servers a fairly heavy context switch, so monitoring this deluge of channels is not fun and nobody can stay on top of all of their servers. I once looked around for maker-y/electronics Discords, and joined probably 7-8, and they were all dead. ##electronics on Libera is highly active.
- anilakar 1y ago
  > deluge of channels Also, once you create a channel in Discord you cannot get rid of it without destroying chat history. With IRC, you just /part without disrupting other people and even then you can go back and read chat logs, nicely persisted on your local disc as text files.
  - pavel_lishin 1y ago
    > Also, once you create a channel in Discord you cannot get rid of it without destroying chat history. This is true; the closest thing you can do is collapse the category that channels are in, and mute the ones you don't want to show up. Any new conversation in a channel will pop them out.

globular-toast 1y ago

This doesn't seem interesting without the code, which I can't find. They said it will be available when "ready". Is it ready yet?

dgl 1y ago

Given the source isn't released, how about an IRCd in bash: https://github.com/dgl/bash-ircd https://github.com/dgl/bash-ircd

vcanales 1y ago

Which channels should we join? Feeling lonely

javanissen 1y ago

I am such a fan of minimal, text-forward, straight to the point website designs like this. I feel like it makes it easier to quickly determine whether the text content is worth reading.

nightmonkey 1y ago

https://libera.chat https://libera.chat is what Freenode turned into after Freenode imploded. Really great communities there - F/OSS-centric, yes, but there are good unofficial channels for cloud services, and even some proprietary software and services, like vscode, AWS, Azure, Oracle, etc. ZNC is an excellent way to keep history between your IRC sessions: https://github.com/znc/znc https://github.com/znc/znc And WeeChat is an excellent companion to ZNC and libera.chat: https://github.com/weechat/weechat https://github.com/weechat/weechat And IRC for Android is an excellent IRC client that also plays well with ZNC: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.countercultured.irc4android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.countercul... Cheers!

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

anthk 1y ago

Also, a gemini browser written in AWK: https://github.com/leovilok/gem.awk https://github.com/leovilok/gem.awk It needs OpenSSL or LibreSSL in order to create network connections.