4 ms·
Why did they write a Scheme debugger in TCL?
by copx 10y ago
Why did they write a Scheme debugger in TCL?
- throwaway7645 10y agoGood question...was wondering the same thing.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoAs I wrote above, the brunt of the work is done inside of the program. The debugger proper is largely just the GUI and a client for the network protocol used to communicate with the program being debugged.
- throwaway7645 10y agoThat part makes sense if Chicken doesn't have a Tk library like Python (i.e. just go to the source).
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoChicken actually does have TK bindings, but they aren't very good. It's got bindings to lots of other toolkits, too, but TK is probably the easiest tookit out there to get working cross platform.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoI dunno. Effectively, it's just a frontend for a TCP protocol that's used to communicate with the program being debugged: this allows for remote debugging and all manner of fun. They probably picked TCL because it's really good at GUIs, which is the brunt of the work feathers is doing, as most of the heavy lifting is done program-side, in scheme. But that's just a guess, if you really want to know, I'd ask Felix: He's the lead developer on Chicken, and he's the one who actually wrote the thing and pushed the commit (see https://code.call-cc.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=chicken-core.git;a=commit;h=86010b507bef896d0b744c47633eb0ede8218a4e https://code.call-cc.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=chicken-core.g...). He's also pretty approachable.