Reminds me of irccat:

https://github.com/irccloud/irccat

Reminds me of irctk: https://a3nm.net/blog/irctk.html

see also: https://tools.suckless.org/ii/

sic too.

https://tools.suckless.org/sic/

It's what ircpipe does but far before.

I wrote something similar that uses Redis pubsub, so you can run the script somewhere to connect and then write simple clients just using Redis: https://github.com/dgl/redis-irc-bot

The neat thing about this is you can then extend it to other protocols. I have a (private) implementation using Apple's Shortcuts so I can also use the same "bots" with Apple Messages.

This looks good as a minimal IRC interface but probably wouldn’t use it as a normal IRC client. It seems it would be good if you wanted to implement a bot.

Am I reading this to mean that IRC servers are sending keepalives of some kind? What's wrong with TCP keepalives if you want keepalives? Not that keepalives are usually all that hot of an idea...

the ping thing came along I think because for a while, you could make connections and sending a bunch of stuff without bothering to read what was returned from the server, and I think the mechanisms at the time for dealing with these flooding connections was this ping thing so it required a fully functioning tcp connection instead of some wierd spoof halfway thing going on at the time. the text value of the ping at least has to be read and returned. thats how I remember it anyways.