Slashdot Mirror

Zmee writes "I am looking to build a 2D application for personal use and I will need to use a canvas to paint custom objects. I am trying to determine what foundation to use and have not located a good side-by-side comparison of the various flavors. For reference, I need the final application to work in Windows; Linux is preferred, but not required. I have looked at WPF, Qt, OpenGL, Tcl/Tk, Java's AWT, and others. I have little preference as to the language itself, but each of the tutorials appear to require significant time investment. As such, I am looking to see what the community uses and what seems to work for people prior to making that investment."

dkf writes "Tcl/Tk 8.5 has been released for all major platforms after 5 years of development. There are many new goodies in it, including significant speedups through an advanced bytecode engine, stronger localization of applications, integrated arbitrary-precision arithmetic, a whole bunch of brand new skinnable widgets, anti-aliased text support on all platforms, and a new code-module management system to make maintenance of installations a snap. More in-depth information about the features of both this release and Tcl/Tk in general is available at the official Tcl/Tk website. Mark Roseman's blog has a first-look review."

dkf writes "Tcl/Tk 8.5 has been released for all major platforms after 5 years of development. There are many new goodies in it, including significant speedups through an advanced bytecode engine, stronger localization of applications, integrated arbitrary-precision arithmetic, a whole bunch of brand new skinnable widgets, anti-aliased text support on all platforms, and a new code-module management system to make maintenance of installations a snap. More in-depth information about the features of both this release and Tcl/Tk in general is available at the official Tcl/Tk website. Mark Roseman's blog has a first-look review."

Pan T. Hose writes "The long awaited release of Parrot 0.1.1 "Poicephalus" has been finally announced on perl.perl6.internals newsgroup and perl6-internals mailing list simultaneously by Leopold Toetsch followed by an announcement on use Perl by Will Coleda and now also on Slashdot." (Read on for a list of changes since the last release, as well as a number of useful links.) Pan T. Hose continues "The most important changes since the previous version 0.1.0 (code-named 'Leaping Kakapo' and released in February) are:

• Python support: Parrot runs 4/7 of the pie-thon test suite
• Better OS support: more platforms, compilers, OS functions
• Improved PIR syntax for method calls and <op>= assignment
• Dynamic loading reworked including a "make install" target
• MMD - multi method dispatch for binary vtable methods
• Library improvement and cleanup
• BigInt, Complex, *Array, Slice, Enumerate, None PMC classes
• IA64 and hppa JIT support
• Tons of fixes, improvements, new tests, and documentation updates

The amazing project which no one had any idea would go so far from the original April Fool's Joke by Simon Cozens (also posted on Slashdot on April 1, 2001) to really unite Perl and Python one day (not to mention Tcl, Scheme, Forth and Ruby, to name just a few) is now available for download from CPAN and via CVS. Those who are not up-to-date with Perl 6 mailing lists can read This Week in Perl 6 weekly summaries by Piers Cawley to have some idea on how's the project been going in the last two years. It's important to read Apocalypses, Exegeses and Synopses together with RFCs and Parrot Design Documents for better understanding of the underlying rationale, especially the superiority of register-based Virtual Machines (like Parrot VM) over stack-based one (like JVM) for modern (dynamically-typed) OO languages with multiple inheritance, operator overloading, traits, roles and much, much more. Parrot Docs, FAQ and examples are also very helpful. This is a very important step in the direction of Perl 6 which we are all looking forward to."