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Wish more people understood this about tcl
by mroll 10y ago
Wish more people understood this about tcl
- pjmlp 10y agoTcl was what made possible one of the best startups I had the privilege to be part of. They had a Rails like stack in the first .com wave, but implemented in a mix of Tcl, Apache and C.
- mroll 10y agoCan I get your email? Would love to hear about that stack
- pjmlp 10y agoIt had an architecture similar to AOL Server, just that the founders did their own thing instead. Tcl was used for almost everything, C for performance critical modules and DB FFI. The interpreter was loaded as an Apache module. We supported Informix, MS SQL Server, Sybase SQL Server and Oracle. All major UNIX variants from late 99's and Windows NT/2000.
- pmontra 10y agoMaybe this is meta (the wish) :-) I remember tcl in the early 90s then it disappeared from my radar, mostly web and mobile apps. Honest question: is it still relevant in some application area?
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoIt's still great at what it was always great at: embedding, acting as a CLI, and doing random grunt work. It's Lua's main competitor, but it can also go toe-to-toe with python and ruby in terms of libraries in some areas (although by no means all of them). In particular, the ease of construction for graphical applications is arguably unmatched (IUP is probably the closest), SQLite was built to work with it, metakit is handy as well in the DB area, it has a great event loop, several OO models, solid unix integration, sold FFI and excellent embedding (as you'd expect), Starkits, which means you can distribute your whole TCL sourcetree as a single file, and a ton of other stuff. So while it's not as popular, relevancy isn't an issue.
- mroll 10y agoThis comment is a great representation of tcl's relevance, which is nice to see because tcl is often dismissed nowadays by people who don't understand it
- mroll 10y agoHah yeah I realized that meta joke after I posted