oldlaptop · HackerTrans

letztes Jahrdiscuss

I can't comment on virtual-table shenanigans, but I'll enthusiastically confirm that thought. Not only is an in-memory database powerful and useful for all the obvious reasons, but (I would argue) the Tcl interface to SQLite is perhaps the best relational database API in any language. (Even if it cheats a bit by being an embedded database, as with <https://sqlite.org/tclsqlite.html#function>.) It's easily as synergistic a combination as Tcl and Tk themseves, possibly more.

oldlaptop

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

(And that is of course what is actually alleged in the indictment.)

oldlaptop

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Alleged musician, surely.

oldlaptop

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I don't (personally) like to think of the type system as "everything is an auto-mutating and cached tagged union + string" - from the perspective of someone writing in Tcl, everything absolutely is a string. It's cool that the implementation happens to store some strings as integers, or arrays, or hash tables, or whatever else as a performance hack, but unless you're actually working with Tcl_Objs at the C level, you generally don't need to care about that.

oldlaptop

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

ALS!? :(

Not to join the Darl McBride Fan Club ("modern-day David" indeed), but nobody deserves that.

oldlaptop

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I don't think clam looks "ridiculous", but I suppose we're in to subjective stuff now. :)

In principle this isn't really any different from GTK or Qt theming (where it's up to users to go forth and find themes they like, and set the default as desired), but in those cases you tend to get themes packaged up by distributions and GUI configuration support from desktop environments, and neither seems likely to happen for Tk.

oldlaptop

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

The definition of "standalone application" is a bit stronger - what's always been possible with "Tclkits" has been to embed the application code in an interpreter binary and distribute that, and the new core zipfs supports that as well.

oldlaptop

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

The theming engine is absolutely "built-in", as are a handful of themes; in particular aqua and the winnative/xpnative/vistanative family (which integrate with the Mac/Windows windowing system such that the application will look "native" by default on those systems).

oldlaptop

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

A theming engine went in something like 15 years ago now; the default theme looks rather dated, but there are plenty of others. See https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/List+of+ttk+Themes (though the screenshots of core themes are from 8.5/8.6 - default in particular has changed a bit in Tk 9).

The "catch" is that the theming engine has its own new widgets, and so to be themed an application has to use the new API. Code from 1995 (or 2005) still produces GUIs from 1995.

oldlaptop

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

The Redis protocol reads a lot like Tcl code.

oldlaptop

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

If there's any better relational database API, in any language, than SQLite's Tcl interface, I've not seen it yet. (And the reasons SQLite's Tcl interface is so good would either be hard to replicate without Tcl, hard to replicate without SQLite, or both.)

oldlaptop

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

From the (little) I've seen of that world, I'm not sure the EDA vendors understand Tcl very well either; I wouldn't want to work with scripts for Cadence's schematic capture tool, and that's not because of Tcl, it's because their scripting interface is a disaster. (Exposing C++ iterators at the script level, for example.)

oldlaptop

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Most of what I'd call the UI - all the toolbars and pseudo-floating-windows - is basic bread-and-butter Tk stuff. The 3D context and CAD kernel would be the tricky bits. There are extensions floating around to work with OpenGL (or whatever), but I don't see doing the heavy CAD-kernel lifting in Tcl - that would likely have to be in C, or whatever. (Just as it presumably is for Onshape.)

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