Tcl/Tk 9 has been released with changes including 64-bit capacity, and improvements to the handling of Unicode and encodings.

Tcl, Tool Command Language, is a high-level, interpreted dynamic programming language. It is open source, cross platform, and was designed with the goal of being simple yet powerful. Everything in Tcl is a command, including constructs such as variable assignment and procedure definition.

The other half of the product is Tk,  a graphical user interface toolkit that can be used to produce rich, native applications that run unchanged across Windows, Mac OS X, UNIX and Linux. Tk's advantages include a canvas widget that makes it easy to create displays with graphics, alongside facilities such as bindings and tags, and a text widget for hypertext capabilities. The developers say that because Tk was designed from the ground up for the rapid development inherent in dynamic programming languages like Tcl, it has advantages over other, C++ based toolkits that lack the simplicity and power of Tk.

The improvements to Tcl 9.0 start with the extension of its 64-bit capacity to enable handling of data values larger than 2Gb. This has been achieved by the elimination of most 32-bit size constraints, and means that Tcl can process larger data sets. This release also comes with full Unicode support, including full emoji support in Tk. The Unicode and encodings improvements include the support for the full codepoint range, more encodings, and the ability to encode profiles to govern I/O.

Zip Filesystems are handled better, so you can now mount zipfiles as filesystems. A related improvement is support for attached archives to enable starkit-style deployment of apps, with support data in filesystem archives attached to executable or libraries.

Another improvement means the central event handling engine in Tcl is now constructed on top of the system calls epoll or kqueue when they are available. If developers are working on platforms where this is not the case, the select based implementation is still supported.

Tk 9.0 improvements start with better access to operating system facilities including  notifications, print, and tray systems. Scalable Vector Graphics handling has also been improved, with partial support in images, and the ability to enable scalable widget and theme appearances.

Tcl/Tk 9 is available now. 

More Information

Tcl/Tk 9 Website

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