picol: A Tcl interpreter in 500 lines of code

https://github.com/antirez/picol

16•tosh•1h ago

Comments

anthk•1h ago

JimTCL has more features and it's almost as small.

catwell•54m ago

You probably know but others might not: they have the same author.

anthk•33m ago

Yep, but Jim has been maintainer over and expanded.

Altough the SDL2 bindings are very alpha.

iberator•6m ago

haha golden comment

JSR_FDED•56m ago

I remember we had users at a chip foundry who were super deep into TCL. Is it still used anywhere else? Would you use it for a new project if you for instance already knew Python or Lua?

danhor•51m ago

It's still the lingua-franca of ASIC/FPGA/Simulation, especially for scripting the tools.

I think it's slowly being replaced there by Python, but it's very slow.

catwell•49m ago

Antirez (the author of this interpreter) uses it for the Redis test suite.

Personally, I know Lua and Python very well but I still used TCL a few years ago for something very specific: using ODBC on Windows. I gave more details on the Lua mailing list here: http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2021-01/msg00067.html

JSR_FDED•24m ago

That was interesting to read. So in your case it came down to ecosystem depth, especially on Windows - where there was a TCL solution to talk ODBC, but the equivalent Lua functionality had issues on Windows.

vodou•17m ago

It is still used for operations procedures in, at least, European space industry. E.g., in mission control systems from Terma (CCS5 and TSC).

antirez•45m ago

iberator•7m ago

best thing about TCL is easy syntax and that everything is a string :) Unique and simple and easy language with very slow changes.

Something like Python in good old days of 2.x before young internet javasceipt devs started pouring A LOT of new features to the language (feature creep).

Nowadays Python is so complex and flooded with ex C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Haskell programmers adding so many features, so fast that it's impossible to follow and understand them :(

Languages should not evolve on that rate. No time to master it :(

/rant

IshKebab•1m ago

> best thing about TCL is easy syntax and that everything is a string :)

What? That's the worst thing about TCL.

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