Tcl/Tk 9.1 Released

113

ddmux about 2 hours ago 24 commentsRead Article on tcl-lang.org

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Discussion (24 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

gbacon•5 minutes ago

The little language that could.

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

trebligdivad•about 2 hours ago

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.

Aldipower•42 minutes ago

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?

gbacon•3 minutes ago

Perl/Tk is a lot of fun. I wrote a solitaire game called tktk — Tk Time Killer — that appeared in The Perl Journal.

https://blog.gbacon.com/publications/2000-perl-journal-tktk/

cmacleod4•about 1 hour ago

For the full release announcements see:

https://newsgrouper.org/%3C119gpah$3eu5q$1@dont-email.me%3E (Tcl) and

https://newsgrouper.org/%3C119gpbh$3eu5q$2@dont-email.me%3E (Tk).

elhosots•about 1 hour ago

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

neofytos•about 2 hours ago

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.

sgt•about 1 hour ago

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.

neofytos•about 1 hour ago

I haven't tested this recently, but I bet it’s equally capable of writing custom Tcl extensions using the C API. Given how stable and clean the Tcl C interface has always been, it’s probably a perfect use case for LLM generation.

sgt•about 1 hour ago

Yeah should work. So that makes it possible to do literally anything. Tcl always had one foot in the old days and one foot in the modern era. It's not like ALGOL or anything.

baggachipz•about 2 hours ago

New version of AOLServer incoming?

elitepleb•about 2 hours ago

https://github.com/naviserver-project/naviserver has you covered

WillAdams•about 1 hour ago

Now if we could just bring back Navi/AOLPress....

pjmlp•about 1 hour ago

Ah, the memories.

The startup I joined in 1999 had its own application server loosely based on AOLServer architecture.

We had Apache + mod_tcl, IIS with our own ISAPI extension, then in box connections for all major RDMS across all key UNIXes and Windows NT/2000.

Some left to join companies doing Vignette projects, others eventually created OutSystems redoing the same ideas, but with the newly released .NET.

However it was also a lesson in performance issues, and the constant pressure to rewrite Tcl code into C extensions.

baggachipz•about 1 hour ago

I used it when I worked at AOL :)

Was great for rapid prototyping and a/b testing in volume. Not sure I'd pick it ever again for anything, but it was interesting for sure.

shaky-carrousel•13 minutes ago

And OpenACS!

fithisux•about 1 hour ago

Or Kenny Tilton's celtk or cello?

aarroyoc•about 1 hour ago

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

cmacleod4•about 1 hour ago

Wayland support is being worked on, aiming for release in Tk 9.2 next year.

See: https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/GSoC+Idea%3A+Tk+Backend+for+t...

5-•41 minutes ago

glfw! that's a bit surprising.

i'd expect sdl, given wider platform coverage (e.g. mobile), more system integration (e.g. clipboard), and an existing port (https://androwish.org/home/dir?ci=trunk&name=jni%2Fsdl2tk)

superkuh•about 2 hours ago

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.

csiegert•15 minutes ago

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.

cmacleod4•5 minutes ago

Try https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Showcase .

fithisux•about 1 hour ago

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