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"There's an interesting benefit you can get from using such a powerful language as a version of Lisp as your primary extensibility language. You can implement o
by zvrba 12y ago
"There's an interesting benefit you can get from using such a powerful language as a version of Lisp as your primary extensibility language. You can implement other languages by translating them into your primary language."
This is so short-sighted hand-waving; it doesn't take into account the existing ecosystem (libraries, tools, etc.) at all. Unlike lisps and schemes, TCL is way less fragmented and has a bunch of libraries for everything. Not to mention that libtcl can be used as a cross-platform layer for files, filesystem, threads, networking, etc.
- dbrower 12y agoAt the time he said it, and about the time of the decision he was making, what you say about the TCL ecosystem was not necessarily true. I was using TCL/TK in '95, and it was clunky then. I have the same misgivings about LUA now, but it seems a better choice for embedding than TCL at the moment. I keep returning to the "I'd like an embedded scripting language in my C environment" year after year, and there is nothing that has made me pull the trigger yet. TCL is a non-starter for me; LUA is dubious; GUILE is a non-starter with GPL licenseing. Java is clunky and heavyweight, but maybe plausible, though it's more common to JNI C into your Java main. I think it'd be nice to have an embeddable Javascript like v8 that can attach to C underpinnings, but don't know if there is one. Maybe duktape?
- orbifold 12y agoNot really think of Javascript and the browser, Javascript is deeply flawed but still powerfull enough to be the target of several compilers. A language like Guile Scheme has the same potential, while TCL has not.