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Tcl/Tk 8.5.0 Released

Posted by kdawson on Sun Dec 23, 2007 05:26 AM
from the slap-and-tickle dept.
Upgrades Programming IT Technology
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."
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Submission: Tcl/Tk 8.5.0 Finally Released by dkf (304284)
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  • Tkinter is the de-facto python windowing kit. This in itself is enough for a new python release. Faster==better, and python always wants to be a bit faster. Tcl/Tk by itself is kind of clunky IMO, but python Tkinter makes good use of it. Thanks Tck/Tk guys!

    • less and less (Score:4, Informative)

      by m2943 (1140797) on Sunday December 23 2007, @06:15AM (#21796834)
      Tkinter is the de-facto python windowing kit.

      I think Gtk is becoming more and more the "de-facto python windowing kit", in particular as Gtk's cross platform support is improving.
      • Although a little more restrictive than straight Tk, I prefer Tcl/Gnocl (Tcl/Gnome/Gtk): http://www.dr-baum.net/gnocl/ [dr-baum.net]

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by kripkenstein (913150)

        Tkinter is the de-facto python windowing kit.

        I think Gtk is becoming more and more the "de-facto python windowing kit", in particular as Gtk's cross platform support is improving.

        Well, the GP is probably basing that claim on that Tkinter is included in Python. Which has made it a sort of default for quick-and-dirty GUI hacking, especially cross-platform.

        However, you are correct about GTK. While there are other alternatives - WxWidgets and Qt both have nice Python bindings - PyGtk seems to be the nicest and most popular, and for good reason, it is an excellent platform. In fact GObject in C (or even C++, via gtkmm) seems clunky after you see how nicely GObject maps into Python cl

        • Re:less and less (Score:4, Insightful)

          by baxissimo (135512) on Sunday December 23 2007, @09:03AM (#21797476)
          I know this is Slashdot but there are still a few people out there using Windows, y'know. And GTK on Windows is just so-so at best. It looks and acts un-natural. Don't know about Mac, but I suspect wx is ahead of GTK in terms of not sticking out like a sore thumb there too.
      • I think Tkinter still has a lot of advantages at this point over GTK. It has plenty of life left in it. At least until someone writes an equally high-level Python interface to a different graphical toolkit and gets it into the standard library.

        If you have a Python application and want to throw a quick GUI onto it, Tkinter is a lot easier. It is also very easy to deploy since it is in the Python standard library. You can write a custom app on your Linux workstation and then the next day put it on a customer'
      • Well the stunning new themeable Tk look is going to change all that, buddy.. Just look at this sample screenshot [sourceforge.net] of how great a Tcl/Tk GUI can now look.

          • Qt for CROSS_PLATFORM applications? I think not! Unless you consider that Cross platform doesn't include Windows.
            Are you trolling? Qt supports Windows at least as well as it supports X11 and MacOS X. It's a joy to code for.
  • Tk has been so in need of a makeover for many years. The widgets in their default state have looked like crusty relics on our grandparents' computers, and even make Windows 3.1 look contemporary. Well done guys. I can't wait to check it out.
    • Yahbut tcl/tk is used to run machines, factories. The hint is in the name.

      Whether the widgets look like Windows, Linux, OSX, Motif or whatever is largely irrelevant as long as the start and stop buttons work when you click them.
       

      • TCL/TK runs speech research (Score:4, Informative)

        by Latent Heat (558884) on Sunday December 23 2007, @11:29AM (#21798380)
        The WaveSurfer speech waveform analysis (pitch, formants, sound spectrogram) package is based on TCL/TK and has Python hooks. This is the free speech package out of KTH is Sweden. It is not my package, by the way so I am not shilling for it, but I have taken an in depth look at it to see how they get to be multi-platform and not Windows-bound.

        I think there may be one other speech analysis package that did spectrograms and used TCL/TK at one point, but I don't think it has an active distribution the way WaveSurfer does.

        What the WaveSurfer people did is that about half their code base is C-language for implementing speech-specific TK widgets, such as a spectrogram Canvas elaboration of the TK Canvas widget. Their C-language routines call down to low-level X to draw things, and if you build on Windows you need some implementation of X. The WaveSurfer Windows distribution, however, is a single .exe file that has WaveSurfer and whatever support libraries all rolled in, so there is a very simply install.

        Their TCL part, however, is a big ball of goo, or at least to someone who doesn't know TCL. Instead of pushing a lot of the functionality into the speech toolkit widgits, they implement a lot of stuff in the TCL layer -- it is not simply a thin scripting layer over a largely C code base. You find that out when you try to customize your own speech app using their speech widgets -- there is tons of functionality that you need to reproduce in your own app as the widgets are pretty bare bones. Not that there is anything wrong with it, but using the WaveSurfer app and hearing about rolling-your-own speech app with their toolkit, you kind of get the wrong impression about how much is in the widgets. I found this out when playing with Python scripting to display their widgets.

        The one thing that appeals to me about TK is the Canvas widget, which was apparently inspired by someone's Scheme graphics or some such thing. No worrying about paint messages and invalid regions -- you just give the Canvas a scene graph of line, text, even 3-color bitmap or even overlaying buttons, and the Canvas takes care of all of that. I would like to see such a high-function widget in other environements.

        I was never bothered by the non-Windows look to WaveSurfer (OK, the lame Files Open dialog of GTK under Windows bothers me, but not most stuff as Windows is not that uniform a GUI experience to begin with).

        • Re:Tcl 9 (Score:2, Informative)

          by kennykb (547805)
          The policy is that major version is bumped only when significant backward incompatibility is expected. New features don't do it unless they break old code.

        • what it's used for has no relevance in reference to that fact.
          Course it does you chickenshit little coward. Function defines form.
           

  • Tcl language vs. Tcl environment (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ElMiguel (117685) on Sunday December 23 2007, @06:10AM (#21796816)
    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.

    • Unfortunately the Tcl language itself is peculiar, dated and just not very good.
      Really? For what purpose?
       

    • Well, by replacing {} by () and judicious use of eval(), they might yet end up with a version of Common Lisp with a decent GUI environment.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Minix (15971)
      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.
      • I understand what you mean. I have a minor Tcl-aversion, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps its the eval[]s you have to put everywhere, or the masses of square brackets, or the unfamiliar syntax in general. One particular quibble I remember is the use of upvar, which, to me at least, seems somewhat clumsy.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Minix (15971)
          Eval isn't as necessary since the new {*} syntactic element was added.

          Unfamiliar syntax - every syntax is unfamiliar until you're familiar with it.

          I don't find []-as-command-substitution-operator too vexing. If you have a syntax-aware editor. It's almost as expressive as lisp, but with less of the nesting hell.

          Upvar/Uplevel are <b>fantastic</b> when you understand what they're used for. Uplevel enables tcl to be completely extensible - you can write new tcl language elements within tcl. For

      • 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.

        In my first job where I got to do any development work I worked with Tcl. I hated how it handled lists, those gave me fits because if I split them wrong I'd get { and } in my output that Tcl inserted into the lists to break them up. And below is a link to something that gave me fits the first time I came across it.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Minix (15971)

          When I worked with Tcl I was still just learning to really think like a developer and understand the process on top of learning Tcl, which really is a fairly complicated language. I'm sure I would have far less trouble with it now that I've got a few years of full time, non-hobby development under my belt but I don't see any reason that I'd want to use it and find out.

          Perhaps to see if you're missing something? It's significant that a lot of Tclers are old and battle-hardened. Perhaps there's something

          • You're probably right, kids these days are taught badly / learn bad habits since they're spoiled by 'limitless' hardware and flashy coding tools. Then they're surprised when all the memory leaks away. (I guess you're an old fart like me - yeah, IDs can be deceptive, I started on an RM 380Z then an IBM System 3). Sounds a little arrogant telling people that they "have to learn good coding habits" - but I'm sure that's not how you meant it. You can get a huge lot done with Tcl, and I quite like it, but it

      • Re:Tcl language vs. Tcl environment (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ElMiguel (117685) on Sunday December 23 2007, @04:07PM (#21800264)

        For what is worth, a lot of experienced people are fans of obscure antique technologies, because that's what they specialized on and they don't want to learn some "new-fangled" substitute from the start. There's still people that swear by VMS, it's just human nature.

        As for what I don't like about the Tcl language, it's mostly just a collection of small things, such as:

        • Operators can only be used if you have an implicit or explicit expr, and no assignment operators. You've got "set" and "incr", but it isn't as readable. Using "$" for variable substitutions but not for variable references is also not very readable.
        • Loads of naming inconsistencies. Just in the predefined commands, you've got words together with no separations ("msgcat"), words together separated by underscores ("auto_load"), mixed case *and* underscores ("tcl_endOfWord"), double colons ("pkg::create"). Then, string operations are grouped together in the "string" command, but you've got separate commands for list operations.
        • The -something options are ugly, in addition to a potential gotcha, because if you have something like "switch $var" everything will work fine until the content of var is, say, "-glob".
        • The "everything can be treated as a string" philosophy sometimes leads to strange results if your program logic has errors. I quite often had to use trial and error to fix this sort of problems.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by belmolis (702863)

          a lot of experienced people are fans of obscure antique technologies, because that's what they specialized on and they don't want to learn some "new-fangled" substitute from the start.

          That is true, but I don't think that it explains the popularity of Tcl within the Tcl community. There are plenty of people who have come to Tcl recently after long experience with other languages. I am one of them. I started programming in Fortran, on punch cards, in 1973. I first used Tcl in 2003, at which point I used mo

    • Unfortunately the Tcl language itself is peculiar, dated and just not very good.

      Realy? What shortcomings do you feel Tcl has? I find it to be a wonderful, simple, expressive language. It's certainly a lot less "peculiar" than Perl, no more "dated" than C, and really good for what I need.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ConceptJunkie (24823) *
        Really, no one seems to think Perl is "peculiar", when it's practically a write-only language, pre-obfuscated for your convenience. Tcl is incredibly simple once you understand it.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by nuzak (959558)
          > Tcl is incredibly simple once you understand it.

          I've never seen a language that actually parses comments, the way Tcl does. There's nothing simple about that.

  • Will Tk Widgets Now Integrate? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RAMMS+EIN (578166) on Sunday December 23 2007, @06:22AM (#21796846) Homepage Journal
    I am only interested in one thing:

    Will the Tk widgets now integrate with the rest of the desktop, in terms of using the same theme settings that other programs use?

    I like how Tk has been used as a GUI toolkit by many programming lanugages, and I think that says something good about its design and implementation, but the ugly, unthemeable, and out-of-place looking widgets have always been a thorn in my eye.

    Especially because it _did_ work sort of right on proprietary OSes as far as I know.
    • Will the Tk widgets now integrate with the rest of the desktop, in terms of using the same theme settings that other programs use?

      Yes [wiki.tcl.tk]

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by zlogic (892404)
        It works well with MacOS X and Windows, but what about Linux? Most Linux apps use GTK, or gtk bindings to some other language, or the GTK theme (like Swing in Java 6). And these screenshots show nothing more than a nicer theme on Linux. And no font antialiasing or hinting!

        • but what about Linux?

          Apparently, some developer are playing with the QT/KDE and GTK theme engine hooks :
          Here's a link to tileqt [ellogon.org] that I found on tcl's page. This theme uses the QT-theme-egine to make TCL/TK applications look like the rest of the KDE desktop. (It works like the gtk2's qt-engine).

          Probably there's also someone working on using GTK2's theme engine so Gnome people can have their applications look like their desktop too. But I'm a KDE user and too lazy to search for that information.

        • It works well with MacOS X and Windows, but what about Linux? Most Linux apps use GTK, or gtk bindings to some other language, or the GTK theme (like Swing in Java 6). And these screenshots show nothing more than a nicer theme on Linux. And no font antialiasing or hinting!

          There's a Qt theme done so integrating with a KDE desktop should be fairly easy. It's not bundled in the standard release due to licensing issues, but would be a superb addon in a Linux vendor customization. I've no idea why nobody's done a GTK one yet (I've been marooned in Windows-land for the past few years and so have focussed on the Tcl scripting side of things; that's my excuse for not doing it myself...)

          The font engine in use should now be the same one as used by everything else on your desktop, i.e

      • Looks good on Windows and Mac but still looks like classic TK under X11 - i.e. it will _not_ match your GTK / QT themes. From the site:

        New and complementary widgets that make use of platform-specific theming on Mac OS X and Windows to better fit in with those environments, and feature an improved look and feel under X11. (screenshots)
  • Wow, didn't know that people used it. Now I know what gramps was talking about when he mentioned "programming tickles!"
  • These days when I write Tcl/Tk code, I'm normally happy with the results and feel very productive in a short space of time. But I keep getting a strange feeling, kind of like I'm working in a building, but the building is empty of people, and everybody else is in another building across the street.


    Anyway, I better get back to writing my Micro Controller Design handbook in Gaelic - I'm sure this one will be a seller, hardly anybody is writing Gaelic computing text books!

  • Apparently Tcl is pronounced 'Tickle'. I learned the hard way after someone had pointed out that I named a file test.tcl.

    • Re:Great news (Score:5, Funny)

      by jd (1658) <imipak@yahCOFFEEoo.com minus caffeine> on Sunday December 23 2007, @05:43AM (#21796758) Homepage Journal
      Yeah, but coders who prefer other languages might be tk'ed off.

    • Re:Great news (Score:5, Informative)

      by Minix (15971) on Sunday December 23 2007, @08:31AM (#21797324)

      There's some great new stuff for Tcl in this release. Built-in dict type http://wiki.tcl.tk/dict [wiki.tcl.tk], Functional Application http://wiki.tcl.tk/apply [wiki.tcl.tk], built-in arbitrary precision integers http://wiki.tcl.tk/10942 [wiki.tcl.tk], at last a sanctioned OO framework http://wiki.tcl.tk/TclOO [wiki.tcl.tk].

      New Tk looks beautiful.

      Tcl runs webservers, robotic manufacturing equipment, and even monitors spacecraft. Odds are that you have probably used a Tcl/Tk application and never even knew it. (If you've watched NBC since 1998, you've seen the results of a Tcl application on screen.)

      I'm an unabashed Tcl fanboy, and this release is great.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by nuzak (959558)
        > at last a sanctioned OO framework http://wiki.tcl.tk/TclOO [wiki.tcl.tk].

        Fantastic indeed, and the syntax looks nice. But you still have to manually destroy objects. Basically, writing Tcl like any other high level language in existence means having crippling memory leaks. So you learn to avoid objects like the bolted-on kludge that they still are. Even perl at least got the memory management part right.

        Python tkinter ought to look nice, but Tcl continues to be a non-starter.

    • Re:They need to start releasing... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Eryq (313869) on Sunday December 23 2007, @07:05AM (#21796994) Homepage
      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.
      • The funny thing is that TCL/TK was what Sun was promoting before they came out with Java and started pushing that.

        Whenever you have one of these overlapping-window GUI front-ends to an OS, developing apps for it is a hard slog, whether it is Windows, GTK, Motif, raw X, whatever. Just like MS came out with their application programmer-friendly Visual Basic as the go-to way of slapping a GUI together, Sun was at one time promoting TCL/TK as the way of slapping a GUI front end on your C program.

        In commerc

        • Frankly for the vast majority of web sites Im kinda tired of the "artist" being involved at all. Most web sites are not supposed to be be works of art... they are supposed to deliver me information in a well designed out format.
          That's an engineer speaking, not an artist. OK, I agree with you, but then I'm also an engineer...
        • Some of the worst offenders are musicians and bands that think having a arty web site will add something

          Haha, that reminded me, some months ago I visited the page of a fellow slashdotter because I was interested in whatever he was advertising with his signature (with a link to his homepage) but after trying to guess wtf was the front page about I left bitterly.

          I found outstanding that in 2007 you can still find pages in which each "option" of the homepage menu is depicted as an image which is *supposed* to

    • Re:It's not necessary anymore (Score:5, Interesting)

      by BridgeBum (11413) on Sunday December 23 2007, @09:36AM (#21797692)
      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.
    • You might have a look at Ruby sometime. It has pretty good language design (inspired by Lisp and Smalltalk), many practicalities copied from Perl, it has plenty of libraries available for it (though not nearly as many as Perl), which are easy to manage with Ruby Gems, and it's easy to interface to C code.

      I find that Ruby is the language that nobody wants to look at, because it's just like the language they're currently happy with (usually Python, often also Perl). It was the same for me for many years (and,

    • Re:It's not necessary anymore (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 198348726583297634 (14535) on Sunday December 23 2007, @11:28AM (#21798374) Homepage Journal
      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 [rs.tc] projects [jabber.ru] being [amsn-project.net] developed [sourceforge.net] 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.

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