The State of the TclQuadcode compiler (2017) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The State of the TclQuadcode compiler (2017) [pdf]

tcl.tk

30 pointsblacksqr14 comments

TCL is fun to write. And with Tk desktop apps are fast and easy to whip up. Kicks Atoms Ass for internal apps and doesn't eat all your ram. I don't get why its gets so much flack. It's sort of a fun mix between lisp and perl. I hope it never dies.

Lots of people hate on TCL, yet, it is still a scripting language used in routers and in NaviServer, which is used by TU-Wien to teach over 40K people, with Gustaf Neumann spearheading it https://dblp.uni-trier.de/pers/hd/n/Neumann:Gustaf . It is used heavily in many other places as well to do useful work.

And don't forget "expect" which is based on TCL also.

F5 Networks uses it too.

This quote sums it up for me "I believe Tcl has been mischaracterized and has suffered in terms of open popularity. But for insiders, it remains as one of those secret indispensable Ninja tools that is used over and over again for competitive advantage." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12025218

The whole thing that it is an ahead-of-time compiler, that is, it runs in advance of execution rather than generating code when a procedure is first executed.. Is very cool.

I hope there will be another update next week at the Tcl Conference in Houston, TX !

I have mostly good words on TCL. But I would be more interested in having a lisp compiler that is adapted to TCL. Tcl faces significant competition these days.

Upsides: It's neat!

Downsides: Oh god TCL is horrible.

Tcl is a joy in the right context, and there’s a lot of places “that context” is present. Tcl is also conceptually simple enough, but sufficiently powerful that it’s a really interesting language/environment to develop in, and indeed hot-rod (or watch being hot-rodded). Fantastic work Donal and Kevin.

It's just dirty lisp without the parens overload. I wouldn't write voluminous amounts of code in it and numerics are tedious at best but it excels at the thing it was designed to do: be a lightweight embeddable language. You can strip it down so that scripts are only usable for configuration settings, safely run untrusted code, or let it be fully Turing complete.

Oh god TCL is horrible

Think of it as a C library with a very flexible configuration file... TCL is amazing and was doing what Lua and Node do a decade or more before they badly reinvented a subset of it and called it new.

What makes Lua worse than TCL? Not a TCL expert.

He is not saying that Lua is worse. Tcl was doing event based programming decades before Node and lua make it trendy.

I'd appreciate if you could add a few words substantiating/explaining what you mean.

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