Pawn Is a Simple, Typeless, 32-Bit Extension Language with a C-Like Syntax

Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago

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35 points

12 comments

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Programming LanguagesEmbedded SystemsScripting Languages

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Programming Languages

Embedded Systems

Scripting Languages

The Hacker News community shares and discusses Pawn, a simple 32-bit extension language with a C-like syntax, highlighting its potential applications and comparisons to other languages.

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Day 8

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01Story posted
Oct 12, 2025 at 7:09 AM EDT
3 months ago
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02First comment
Oct 19, 2025 at 9:29 PM EDT
8d after posting
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8 comments in Day 8
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Oct 27, 2025 at 12:31 AM EDT
3 months ago
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Discussion (12 comments)

Showing 12 comments

j-scott

3 months ago

3 replies

See also Sourcepawn[0], popular in the sourcemod engine community for custom server plugins and game modes.

[0] https://github.com/alliedmodders/sourcepawn

nrawe

3 months ago

Many hours of fun it was running CounterStrike servers and writing my own plugins. Halcyon days :)

ziml77

3 months ago

Ah I remember writing a couple TF2 mods in sourcepawn years back. Those were fun to play with friends!

comex

3 months ago

I used this a very long time ago and rather disliked it. My impression at the time was that it was just a worse version of C. As low-level as C, with fewer features, and much slower - unlike a normal scripting language which is slower but higher-level with more features.

They've since changed the language syntax, but this is the version I was dealing with:

https://wiki.alliedmods.net/Introduction_to_SourcePawn_(lega...

No structs/classes/objects. No pointers. You had to store everything with arrays of primitives.

bakugo

3 months ago

1 reply

A slightly modified version of this was used as the gameplay scripting language in Pokémon games from gens 6 to 8:

https://github.com/SciresM/gf-pawncc

nucleogenesis

3 months ago

The story in the readme is hilarious

nkotov

3 months ago

1 reply

Reminds me of the good ol' days of SA:MP.

krustowski

3 months ago

let's resurrect these days with open.mp!

iknowstuff

3 months ago

Oh yeah wrote thousands of lines in it. Overall awful language but many fond memories for server owners. These days I’d probably just implement a wasm runtime.

munchlax

3 months ago

What were they thinking?

Wait while I'm compiling pawn?

Lets solve the problem in pawn?

I'm writing pawn for a living?

I made a pawn program just for you?

Why.

porkbrain

3 months ago

Used for example to write GTA SAMP modes. I remember writing them in Pawno IDE. The scripts would get large as I'd export positions of many objects and paste them into the scripts to spawn in game. Makes for an okey "how I started programming" story.

gbarletta

3 months ago

My first programming language! I used to write SA:MP gamemodes with it, and was also my gateway to the C language: it is easily embeddable and I had a lot of fun learning C while writing toy runtimes :)

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ID: 45557272Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 1:54:04 PM

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