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Tcl/Tk 8.5.0 Released

Posted by kdawson on from the slap-and-tickle dept.

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."

2 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Re:They need to start releasing... by Eryq · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why Java won that market I can't possibly fathom.

    It didn't. Flash did.

    Java might have won if the original JDK hadn't been so primitive and difficult to work with. Even long after Swing was released, browsers were still shipping with ancient 1.1 JVMs, and installing newer JVMs wasn't an automatic (or even simple) process for some browsers and platforms.

    Still, though, Flash probably would have won out in the end. Swing is designed for desktop applications: standard menubars, dialogs, etc. -- themeable, maybe, but BORING to a web designer's eyes. With Flash, cool weird unique user interfaces are the whole point.

    The engineer and UI-standards-advocate in me appreciates Swing. The artist wants to learn Flash.

    --
    I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
  2. Re:It's not necessary anymore by 198348726583297634 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not so.

    Tcl's strongest redeeming features are its consistency and its sensibility. Tcl very strongly has a principle of least surprise, thanks to these. That alone makes programming in Tcl a joy compared with many, many other things. You'll spend a lot less time wondering how your code will work on a foreign platform, which flags a given widget expects, and so on.

    Tcl of 2007 is also not Ousterhout's Tcl of 1987. A lot has happened in the last 20 years, including totally pervasive unicode support (the [msgcat] library makes internationalization such a breeze, there's absolutely no reason not to make all your programs localizable from the start), some very healthy namespace functionality, an excellent networking library, and of course the relatively recent Tile toolkit.

    There are also new projects being developed with Tcl all the time.

    Far from being an outdated or dying language, Tcl today is just a well-kept secret, sitting out in plain sight.