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Comment by jhallenworld | Hacker News Reader

Tcl: one of the slowest languages

https://github.com/trizen/language-benchmarks

Tcl: No significant difference to Python or Perl

It matters even less for Tcl, as it's supposed to tie pieces written in more performant languages together. See "Ousterhout's dichotomy"[1]. Sadly that also moved it closer to something like Rexx (or Lua these days), and thus no proper module/package community ever arose in time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ousterhout%27s_dichotomy

Maybe true, but there are fast math extensions:

https://realpython.com/numpy-tensorflow-performance/

Yes. Those work by tying python to pieces written in a more performant language.

And Perl has PDL. Not aware of anything for Tcl beyond math::statistics, but I think it waned in popularity way before the ML bubble started inflating.

But in my experience, the strategy for Tcl is the inverse of Python when it comes to domming/subbing with your "partner language". You _extend_ python, you _embed_ Tcl.

At least in the areas where Tcl still survives. It lost long ago against the P-languages, but still faces Lua rather bravely in the enterprise/engineering sector.

A pretty good read on tcl - and why the F5 devices use tcl for their iRules (2012, Updated two years ago).

https://devcentral.f5.com/s/articles/irules-concepts-tcl-the...

Tcl is really nice to work with. It’s a weird mix between a programming language and a command line interface.

If you’ve never touched it, I recommend you to do so if you are curious :)

Maybe Tcl does recursion poorly — those all seem to be tiny recursive functions.

Maybe there was something Tcl did well?

https://web.archive.org/web/20060924085254/http://shootout.a...

TCL had an amazing architecture for someone who was working in C. In C, you'd (1) create an instance of a TCL interpreter, (2) register your C functions with the TCL interpreter, and then (3) load scripts into the TCL interpreter. You'd do all your fast stuff in your C code, and just use the TCL for stitching together the high-level logic.

This, it is really easy to embed the tcl interpreter. Far easier than perl and python, even easier than lua.

Especially the commands were invoked command_name(argv, argc) and the thing was just like a CS 101 C program. Dead simple, and as they mentioned just used to orchestrate the fast stuff. You shouldn't make a command block a long time, but you could grab a handle to the output destination and set it up to stream output there from the C.

But it's the fastest way to put together a GUI.

Does Tcl deal with platform-specific GUI elements, or does it restrict you to a lowest common denominator set of widgets?

Are there different dialog layout controllers? For example, in Swing there's BoxLayout, CardLayout, SpringLayout, etc...

You get both native and custom GUI elements with modern Tk.

And yes, there are plural "layout controllers" (Tk calls them "geometry managers").

I believe they are referring to the Tk GUI toolkit, which is intended for use from Tcl and really nice to work with. It is full featured and has plenty of widgets and layout controllers. You can find out all about Tk here: https://tkdocs.com/

It is really fast and easy to create GUIs using Tcl/Tk, e.g. here is a Tcl script to create a paint-like program in less than 50 lines: https://pastebin.com/6qibnQcJ

The main downside is that the look and feel is not native, and a bit dated. There are some efforts to update the look, but it's not as slick as Gtk etc.

What about tkinter for Python?

I dunno if you were going for irony or not with that!

I always thought Java should have just used Tk rather than developing AWT, which never worked very well.

wtf luajit is a monster

It really is. Mike Pall is... beyond words. https://web.archive.org/web/20170102051538/http://article.gm...

(Discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588696)

I think it's cheating a bit to compare JIT vs runtime script evaluation. I'd be more interested to see LuaJIT performance measured against something more comparable, like JS running on V8.

Probably why it's so popular in games as a scripting engine (going back to 2003).

> in games as a scripting engine (going back to 2003)

you are think of lua, luajit is a different beast.

http://luajit.org/changes.html

LuaJIT 1.0.3 — 2005-09-08

This is the first public release of LuaJIT.

Didn't realize they had the Python/PyPy thing going on. Thanks for the info!

I thought it was dead/dying though? No future plans to add new features, especially sense the creator said he was done with it...

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