picat mit Homebrew, apk, Nix installieren

Projektlinks

• Homepage
• Paketmanager-Seite

Befehle und Aliase

• picat

Projektgeschichte

Neng-Fa Zhou and collaborators designed Picat as a scalable logic-based, multi-paradigm language. The initial design was published in December 2012, and the first alpha release appeared in May 2013.

The implementation is based on the B-Prolog engine. Over time the language added and refined constraint, planning, tabling, scripting, and Prolog-compatible facilities; version 3.0 added Prolog-style Horn clauses and definite-clause grammars.

Adoptionsgeschichte

The project’s guide credits early community review and hundreds of Picat programs written from May 2013 onward as important to the language’s rapid maturation. Picat later developed a presence in constraint-programming education, programming contests, and solver competitions.

The official site records first-place performance in the 2021 LP/CP programming contest and competitive results in later XCSP and MiniZinc challenges. It is distributed through several Unix package ecosystems, including Homebrew, Alpine Linux, and Nix.

Wie es verwendet wird

Users can start an interactive Picat session with the picat command, load and debug programs, or execute a .pi program directly when it defines main/0 or main/1. Common application areas include constraint models, combinatorial search, planning, contest problems, and scripts.

Warum Paket-Nerds sich dafür interessieren

Picat interests language-package enthusiasts because it packages a comparatively uncommon blend of Prolog-like relations, imperative assignments and loops, tabling, constraint solving, planning, and scripting in one standalone interpreter.

Its implementation lineage through the B-Prolog engine and its interfaces to SAT, SMT, and mathematical-optimization solvers make it a compact gateway into several declarative-programming traditions.

Zeitleiste

• 2012: Initial Picat design published.
• 2013: First alpha version released in May.
• 2021: Picat team won the LP/CP programming contest.
• 2022: Version 3.3 released.
• 2023: Versions 3.4 and 3.5 released.
• 2024: Versions 3.6 and 3.7 released.
• 2025: Versions 3.8 and 3.9 released.
• 2026: Version 3.9#11 released on July 16.

Related projects

• Picat is implemented on the B-Prolog engine and is conceptually related to Prolog, constraint-programming systems, and modeling languages. Its official guide documents interfaces to Kissat, Gurobi, CBC, GLPK, SCIP, and Z3.

Quellen

• Official Picat User’s Guide: https://picat-lang.org/download/picat_guide_html/picat_guide.html
• Official Picat homepage: https://picat-lang.org/index.html
• Official releases page: https://picat-lang.org/download.html