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Tcl Core Team Interview

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the tcl-me-donal dept.

Gentu writes "OSNews features a nice and long-ish interview with the Tcl core development team for just about everything. " Covers a lot of ground like what they actually use Tcl for, how they came to maintaining Tcl and so forth.

2 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Some TCL Strengths by zapatero · · Score: 4, Informative

    One place that TCL really shines is with async sockets. TCL makes it really easy to prototype a server. It's builtin support of the server socket [socket -server cmd ...] enables a very easy creation of an non-forking iterative server, that does surprisingly well. And is also remarkably portable between windows, Linux, and Solaris.

    I've also used Python for this, but I feel that Python's asyncore is still too buggy for prime time, and also the asynchore library is slightly more complex to utilize.

    Another great aspect of TCL is how easy it is to extend. I can compare directly to JNI and Python extensions. TCL by far has the easiest and cleanest extension API for C or C++.

    And finally embedding an TCL interpreter into another ap, is equally easy... Hence the near ubiquitour support of TK in other scripting languages, including Python and Perl.

    Opinions from experience.

  2. Re:Your most unusual Tcl application by kennykb · · Score: 5, Informative
    Ohh, where to begin? Many of the most important Tcl applications are so unusual that you don't realize that Tcl is there under the hood.

    Tcl runs the operator interface of Shell Oil's Auger, a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. See pictures of the rig here, and read about the system integrators here.

    Don't like oil rigs? Well, it's highly unlikely that you can mod this post down without the Tcl that's built into practically every Cisco router on the planet. Read Cisco's tesimonial.

    Once you've done that, go log off and watch TV. Oh yeah, did you know that the NBC network control system is a Tcl application? It is; it's been in the digital broadcast system from prototype all the way to full 24x7 operation. ComputerWorld ran an article about the project.

    Science geeks will be interested that a Tcl interface is used to program the Hubble Space Telescope

    Database heavies will be intrigued by the intimate role that Tcl has in Oracle Enterprise Manager.

    I could go on all evening, this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.