Highlights of Tcl 9.0
- 64-bit Capacity: Data values larger than 2Gb
- Unicode and Encodings: full codepoint range, added encodings, encoding profiles to govern I/O, and more.
- Zip Filesystems: mount zipfiles as filesystems
- Attached Archives: enable starkit-style deployment of apps, with support data in filesystem archives attached to executable or libraries. Build tclsh and wish this way.
- New Notifiers: The central event handling engine in Tcl is now constructed on top of the system calls epoll or kqueue when they are available. The select based implementation also remains for platforms where they are not.
- Many new commands and features
Important Incompatibilities in Tcl 9.0
- Namespace varname resolution: Current namespace, not global.
- I/O malencoding: now raises error by default.
- Tilde (~) in pathnames: no longer interpreted as home directory.
- tcl_precision no longer has effect on number formatting
Highlights of Tk 9.0
- Access to OS facilities: notifications, print, and tray systems
- Scalable Vector Graphics: partial support in images, extensive use to enable scalable widget and theme appearances.
- Images: full access to metadata and alpha channel.
- Platform Features and Conventions: many improvements, including two-finger gesture support where available.
Serious question: I’ve never met a programmer who has ever actually written anything in Tcl in the real world. If you’ve working in Tcl, tell me about it! What did you use it for and when? Was it awesome/terrible/etc.?
I inherited completely undocumented TCL code at work. I had never heard of TCL before that. That was fun.
The molecular mechanical modeller NAMD and its viewer use TCL as the CLI interface, and it’s…fine. I would prefer BASH or python, but it works just fine.
Also Tk is how most LaTeX drawing is dealt with, so trying to modify, say circuit diagrams or chemical structures drawn directly in LaTeX (I.e.
chemfig) requires using some Tcl. Again, it’s…fine. No huge complaints.Edit: bad memory, the drawing program in LaTeX is TikZ not TkZ, its unrelated to Tk.
Back in the day TCL was used in a few places in Pixar’s Renderman renderer (called PRMan), and in its connection to Maya. You could write little TCL scripts within the Renderman Artist Tools (RAT) that would be evaluated during scene export. I think this still exists in some form inside Tractor, which is their renderfarm management software.
It’s been a long time since I used prman but generally Python has replaced everything as the “glue” language, which honestly makes things a lot easier. VFX and game dev used to have a hundred different scripting languages rolling around.