Show HN: Teaish – An Alternative to Tcl's TEA

As the "final step" in porting the SQLite project's build infrastructure from the GNU Autotools to Steve Bennett's Autosetup, we're left with porting over the TEA (Tcl Extension Architecture, a.k.a. tclconfig) build, i.e. its Tcl extension DLL.

Rather than write a bespoke solution which only works for SQLite, we've instead created teaish (as in "kinda like TEA"), which offers an easy-to-use alternative to the Autotools-driven TEA.

Its main features include:

- Easy to use: just create 1-3 files which describe the extension, run teaish's "configure" script on it, and you're ready to build.

- Can create new stub Tcl extensions and their teaish-specific files with a trivial invocation.

- Supports out-of-tree builds.

- Supports tests. If no tests are provided by the client then it generates one which ensures that the compiled extension can at least be loaded by Tcl.

- Generates install/uninstall makefile rules, and the former automatically tests that the resulting installation can be loaded using Tcl's "package require".

- Generates "make dist" rules for packaging your extension up for distribution.

- Builds MUCH more quickly than extensions build using TEA. For example, the SQLite extension with -O2 optimization builds in 20 seconds on my laptop with teaish vs 40 seconds with TEA. An -O0 build is even faster: 3.5 seconds vs 23 seconds.

- Works with Tcl 8.5+.

- Tested with several Linux flavors, OpenBSD, Cygwin, Msys2, and even Haiku(!).

We have not yet officially replaced the SQLite TEA build with teaish because we first need to determine the downstream impact of doing so and how we can adapt teaish to minimize that impact (we're in communication with the Tcl folks about that). The SQLite Tcl extension is, however, heavily used in teaish's development.