Tcl/Tk 9.1

I have a soft corner for TCL, because of its idiosyncracies and weird dynamic stringy playfulness. I would be wary of using it professionally but to play around for the fun of it ... it's just too much fun. Upvar and uplevels are crazy.

Python is that kind of cool one behaves when visiting parents of your would be spouse for the first time. Tcl on the other hand is like playing one's secret exclusive and somewhat dangerous games with kid school bestie.

Tcl/Tk pioneered the notion of a scripting language as a library. It got threading right. You can run multiple independent Tcl interpreters in the address space of your process and they can exchange messages. Entirety of interpreter state is encapsulated inside the interpreter object, no globals. To a user an it is just a pointer to an object.

No need for GIL, no need for serialization/deserialization (pickle/unpickle) ... just within process memory copy (or no copies in case data is immutable).

The biggest early selling point of Tcl was Tk, as a relatively easy way to make good-enough GUI programs with open source on Unixen and the X Window System. Even much easier than the easier-to-use X toolkits like XView with C, and the alternatives only got more difficult from there. There were no Web frontends.

Tcl itself was quite clever as what I'd actually call a string-based scripting language (contrast with Bourne/C-shell/etc. that preceded it on Unix).

Originally, Tcl was among the handful of off-the-shelf extension languages. You write your big application in C or C++, and then you embed an interpreter for a higher-level extension language, for users or the original developer to add on functionality. The options at the time were usually a small Lisp/Scheme, Tcl, Python, or something entirely bespoke and probably quirky and half-butted.

During early dotcoms, there was considerable interest in Tcl for backend work, and it also wouldn't have been the worst choice to put into the browser. Like Python, Tcl would've been more accessible and democratizing-the-Web than JavaScript, and there were already solid off-the-shelf designs and implementations. (Scheme would've appeared slightly more intimidating than Python or Tcl, and was more powerful, which I think was why Tim Berners-Lee preferred Python over Scheme as the people's programming language for various Web purpose. The semantics of the JavaScript we got was more a hurried toy Scheme, plus the simplest object model, and a more intimidating syntax that came from systems programming.)

Tcl/Tk has got to be the easiest GUI system out there; you can get simple stuff going with no effort - nothing I've seen comes close to that simplicity.

Good to see it's getting some modern support.

Tcl is certainly a bit weird and takes getting used to, but I have found it worth learning its idiosyncrasies, particularly because my applications use sqlite, which fits very naturally with Tcl.

From D. Richard Hipp [1]:

"SQLite is a TCL extension that has escaped into the wild.

"The design of SQLite was inspired by the design of TCL, both in the way it handles datatypes and in the formatting of its source code. The index use case for SQLite was in a Tcl/Tk application for an industrial company. From its inception, SQLite has always depended heavily on TCL. These days, SQLite no longer uses TCL internally and can be run separately from any TCL interpreter, and yet the SQLite development process still depends heavily on TCL."

[1] https://www.tcl-lang.org/community/tcl2017/assets/talk93/Pap...

Tcl is way too smart of a language for its own good. I love how everything is a string or can be hacked on a string, so you can basically do levels of metaprogramming that reach unheard of levels

I once had an O'Really book named 'Perl/Tk'. I mean, I still have it somewhere... I've the feeling reading through it will maybe become my AI recovery therapy at some point?

Congrats to the community and the core team. Their dedication to maintaining Tcl/Tk as a gold standard of stability, pragmatism, and lightweight cross-platform development is inspiring.

Many VLSI CAD tools come with a tcl console window. Im gratified to see the continued language support

Kudo’s to Mr Osterhout’s long lived legacy

For the full release announcements see:

https://newsgrouper.org/%[email protected]%3E (Tcl) and

https://newsgrouper.org/%[email protected]%3E (Tk).

The cool thing is that even if you take something arguably super modern, like the latest Claude models, it is able to write Tcl/tk applications for you that you might not have done at that level in the past. With tests in tcltest too.

If you understand how generative models and agentic coding works, it's not a surprise. But for some reason it's still mind boggling to think that you can take very old stuff and build impressive programs.

Many years ago, I worked at a company that used Tcl as the scripting language for its primary product. At one point, a hotshot product manager started agitating to replace it with something more modern. He claimed that Tcl was dying because (wait for it) there were no books being published about it at the time. I guess he was wrong ... :-)

New version of AOLServer incoming?

I wonder when Linux distros will start shipping 9.0 or 9.1. Even Arch is still stuck on 8.6, despite 9.0 being released two years ago.

The little language that could.

“Tcl tends to get ported to weird places like routers.” (Larry Wall, October 1997)

Excellent to read Tk is getting better acessibility support. I love using it for quick little Perl/Tk GUI applications but I'm also slowly going blind from retinal tearing. It's good to see progress in some GUI toolkits when major desktops like KDE have dropped accessibility in their latest releases.

Last time I checked, there was no Wayland support (other than executing in XWayland). Has it changed?

I'm familiar with Tcl because many Cisco routers actually support it as a scripting language.

I tried to get into tk via ruby-tk.

I ended up really disliking tk.

Using ruby-gtk2 and ruby-gtk3 was much nicer. (Sadly, gtk4 sucks, so that's the end of the story there.)

I kind of want a universal toolkit that works everywhere and is also good. Right now I use ... well, either the web (that's ok, though I hate how I can not easily open local files and so forth, without having to use node), or swing via jruby-swing - which semi-sucks, but it also works on windows and it actually is not that bad. (I could use javafx etc... but it is so much easier to get started with swing). I also use libui-ng which is ok but lacks many features, sadly.

Tcl/Tk has saved me back in the day. The Windows distribution BAWT/Magicsplat are timely updated

..... but they do not come with Next Scripting Framework.

There was a new release on September 16, 2026

FFS, I clicked around for a few minutes and not a single screenshot of what the GUI toolkit is capable of. Even the highlights’ “Themed, Truly Native User Interfaces” chapter and the freaking docs that describe the widgets do not show a single screenshot. I’m shaking my head in disbelief.

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