Tcl/Tk 8.5.0 Released

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."

Comments

Tcl language vs. Tcl environment

[ElMiguel]

From what I've seen, the internals of the Tcl environment (the interpreter, libraries and so on) are pretty solid and nicely done. Unfortunately the Tcl language itself is peculiar, dated and just not very good. I wish the Tcl people would consider a thorough backward-incompatible revamp of the language into something a bit less off-putting.

Re:Tcl language vs. Tcl environment

[Minix]

Tcl's internals are well done, and the QA is exemplary - a Tcl alpha is as good as anybody else's beta.

I've noticed that some people don't like Tcl as a language, but can't personally understand why. Tcl seems to be a favorite of a lot of well experienced people who can make it stand up and sing.

I used to think that Tcl-aversion was due to extreme syntactic simplicity, but now I think the simplicity is deceptive, and Tcl is just too hard for some programmers: you need a deep stack to write Tcl well.

Re:It's not necessary anymore

[BridgeBum]

TCL is still used in some surprising places. A good example is networking equipment, such as Cisco devices, F5 load balancers, and so on. Many of these have TCL capabilities for one reason or another. A good example for the Cisco case would be their load balancing devices. You can create custom monitoring scripts in TCL and import them into the device.