First beta release of Tcl/Tk 9.0 now available

tcl-lang.org

32 points·cmacleod4··7 comments

Version 9.0b1 of the Tcl programming language and Tk GUI toolkit is now available. New features include general conversion to 64-bit architecture allowing very large data structures, support for the full range of unicode characters, ability to mount zip archives as virtual filesystems, etc..

I've been aware of Tcl/Tk for a long time but have never really taken the plunge but the following line ,,truly cross-platform GUI's" really stands out in its about page (https://www.tcl.tk/about/).

I have used imgui and it's bindings in multiple languages extensively, any Tk mains can shed some light on how it compares, ie in the areas of speed, devex, tooling and cross-compilation.

I have no experience of imgui but I found a comparison article here: https://dercuano.github.io/notes/imgui-tk.html

Congratulations on a major release!

Genuine question: Would you recommend learning Tcl/Tk from scratch in 2024, and in that case for what use cases?

For your Decent Espresso machine

Details at https://openacs.org/conf2023/info/download/file/decentespres... and https://learn.wu.ac.at/eurotcl2023/lecturecasts/690830882?m=...

There's not a lot of commercial demand for Tcl these days. Some people, like me, find that it fits their way of thinking and find its radical minimalism liberating. Many others do not.

My current Tcl/Tk project is a usenet/web gateway. This involves a backend Tcl process (no Tk) which uses https://core.tcl-lang.org/tcllib/doc/trunk/embedded/md/tclli... to read articles from an NNTP server, and https://code.ptrcrt.ch/retcl/doc/tip/docs/index.html to cache these in Redis. Then each user gets a front-end Tcl/Tk process on the same server which reads articles etc. from the shared Redis cache and presents them in a fairly simple GUI. I use https://tktreectrl.sourceforge.net/treectrl.html to show newsgroups and article threads in tree structures. The GUI can then be used remotely in a web browser via https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/CloudTk (which is built on top of http://standard.prd.co.uk/man/tclhttpd.man).

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