Tcl Announces NaTcl: Native Client Tcl

Minix writes "Tcl has announced the first scripting language to be supported by NaCl (Google's native client,) giving Tcl programs direct access to Chrome's DOM and marking the first such scripting language alternative to JavaScript. A demonstration of direct Tcl access to HTML5's Canvas is given. A variant of Tk for Native Client will soon follow. Web applications can right now be written completely in Tcl, as the original HTML specifications intended :)"

Comments

Going backwards some more...

[GameboyRMH]

All security arguments aside, it seems that we may be going from an architecture-independent web to an architecture-dependent one. Sad. Maybe the mid-2000s will seem like a golden age of openness in the future. Platform-independent web applications were the hot new thing, the iPhone hadn't come out so open mobile devices still existed, anybody who suggested running native code from websites, or producing a locked-down device would have been laughed out of the room...ah the good ol' days...

Re:Going backwards some more...

[CharlyFoxtrot]

LOLWUT?

YA RLY

The iPhone started the migration from web applications to client apps - their rejection of Flash actually played a large part in that - it would be ironic, except that was actually their intent.

You might remember the original iPhone was webapp only and there was a big kerfuffle about it: "No iPhone SDK Means No iPhone Killer Apps". It was marketed as "The internet in your pocket". They did eventually release an SDK of course but even now they do not do what the OP accuses them of, namely mixing the two. They've always cleanly separated web and native, keeping the web part as based on common, universal standards as they keep the native part closed. If there has been a migration from web to native don't blame Apple for giving people what they want.

Re:NaCl - the new ActiveX. Yuck!

[Minix]

Native Client is open source. So any browser, even IE, could incorporate it.

In that important respect they are very different.

Half standard

[DrYak]

only for people who want to restrict their website to Chrome users.

Well, uh, not necessarily.

HTML standard itself has never required specific scripting language. That's why it's a requirement to specify the language used. That's why you also have monstrosities as VBScript used on the web.

Also, the same source already cites Tcl as a possible language, with even the corresponding content type. So it's a recognized possibility for some time. It only happens that nobody used it before google.

Last but not least, unlike VBScript, Tcl is not proprietary, is well documented and has an opensource implementation and no known patent limitation, so it's freely usable by anyone. Thus if this thing catches on, it could be used by most browsers (except maybe by Microsoft Internet Explorer which, as usual, would probably lag behind in implementing open standards).

What will stop adoption is not the language itself. It's the fact that, for 99.9% people out there, Javascript is more than enough.
Python would probably have a better chance of ever being used - and even it doesn't stand much a chance against the js establishment.

Re:Half standard

[Minix]

What you say about the standard agnosticism is true, and indeed the HTML spec mentions Tcl as a scripting language.

<quote><p>What will stop adoption is not the language itself. It's the fact that, for 99.9% people out there, Javascript is more than enough.
Python would probably have a better chance of ever being used - and even it doesn't stand much a chance against the js establishment.</p></quote>

One of the first arguments in favour of scripting languages is that they were measured to be five times faster to develop in than C.

It may be that JavaScript has inherited some of those impediments to code writing from C.

You state, quite correctly, that there are a lot of JavaScript fragments out there, and an 'establishment' of frameworks.

However, the quality of a lot of the JS is fairly low, and it may just be that the need for frameworks is driven to some extent by the Javascript language itself, not merely the need to cope with IE.

I think this experiment in alternatives to javascript may yield very interesting results. We have found, for example, that Tk is a very good language and framework for laying out Web GUIs.

Try using a JS-heavy web app with JS turned off

[tepples]

It's a good thing.

Not when IE, Safari, Firefox, Opera, Mobile Safari, and Android's browser don't support the NaCl required for NaTcl. Firefox has explicitly rejected NaCl, and Apple would likely reject it as an end run around the App Store. And not when members of your site's audience on corporate computers have NaCl turned off for the same reason they have ActiveX turned off. For them, it'd be like turning JavaScript off, which makes a lot of web applications nearly unusable.

Wasn't Lua first?

[Corsix]

I thought that one of the samples included with NaCl was a Lua interpreter, meaning that TCL is far from being first.

Re:What does iPad matter?

[h4rr4r]

I never said it did, only that it was popular and not x86. I own lots of things that are not x86, some more popular than others. Breaking the web for my sparc workstation would be pretty annoying.

Re:I don't understand the obsession with canvas

[shutdown -p now]

Canvas, on its basic level, is turtle graphics of the HTML5 age. It's very handy for short, simple demos.