picol: A Tcl interpreter in 500 lines of code

https://github.com/antirez/picol

20•tosh•1h ago

Comments

anthk•1h ago

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

catwell•1h ago

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

anthk•1h ago

Yep, but Jim has been maintainer over and expanded.

Altough the SDL2 bindings are very alpha.

iberator•33m ago

haha golden comment

JSR_FDED•1h 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•1h 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•1h 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•51m 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•44m 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).

sprash•24m ago

Tcl/Tk to this day is the best tool to make GUI frontends for CLI applications. Besides that, in the past I used it in production for intranet database entry applications. It has since been replaced by Flask. In my opinion the higher complexity of the Flask version is no way justified and we should have kept the much simpler ~2k LOC Tcl/Tk solution.

rausr•7m ago

We've got Check Point Firewalls at work, and during updates I see lots of .tcl in the web UI.

antirez•1h ago

iberator•34m 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•29m ago

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

What? That's the worst thing about TCL.

iberator•5m ago

I love it. Living proof that languages doesn't need forced types.

Data is Data. It's kinda object programming as visioned in the 70".

So easy and trivial language.

Pay08•24m ago

That's certainly a take...

I’m joining OpenAI

I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

Building SQLite with a small swarm

Magnus Carlsen Wins the Freestyle (Chess960) World Championship

picol: A Tcl interpreter in 500 lines of code

Expensively Quadratic: The LLM Agent Cost Curve

Modern CSS Code Snippets: Stop writing CSS like it's 2015

Arm wants a bigger slice of the chip business

1,300-year-old world chronicle unearthed in Sinai

Lost Soviet Moon Lander May Have Been Found

Designing a 36-key custom keyboard layout (2021)

LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

Audio is the one area small labs are winning

Show HN: Solving Sudoku reasoning via Energy Geometric models

I gave Claude access to my pen plotter

JavaScript-heavy approaches are not compatible with long-term performance goals

Show HN: Microgpt is a GPT you can visualize in the browser

Databases should contain their own Metadata – Use SQL Everywhere

EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear

Pocketblue – Fedora Atomic for mobile devices

Real-time PathTracing with global illumination in WebGL

Error payloads in Zig

Gwtar: A static efficient single-file HTML format

GNU Pies – Program Invocation and Execution Supervisor

I Love Board Games: A Personal Obsession Explained by Psychology

Show HN: Knock-Knock.net – Visualizing the bots knocking on my server's door

How long do job postings stay open?

Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

Transforming a Clojure Database into a Library with GraalVM Native Image and FFI

Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

I’m joining OpenAI

I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

Building SQLite with a small swarm

Magnus Carlsen Wins the Freestyle (Chess960) World Championship

picol: A Tcl interpreter in 500 lines of code

Expensively Quadratic: The LLM Agent Cost Curve

Modern CSS Code Snippets: Stop writing CSS like it's 2015

Arm wants a bigger slice of the chip business

1,300-year-old world chronicle unearthed in Sinai

Lost Soviet Moon Lander May Have Been Found

Designing a 36-key custom keyboard layout (2021)

LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

Audio is the one area small labs are winning

Show HN: Solving Sudoku reasoning via Energy Geometric models

I gave Claude access to my pen plotter

JavaScript-heavy approaches are not compatible with long-term performance goals

Show HN: Microgpt is a GPT you can visualize in the browser

Databases should contain their own Metadata – Use SQL Everywhere

EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear

Pocketblue – Fedora Atomic for mobile devices

Real-time PathTracing with global illumination in WebGL

Error payloads in Zig

Gwtar: A static efficient single-file HTML format

GNU Pies – Program Invocation and Execution Supervisor

I Love Board Games: A Personal Obsession Explained by Psychology

Show HN: Knock-Knock.net – Visualizing the bots knocking on my server's door

How long do job postings stay open?

Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

Transforming a Clojure Database into a Library with GraalVM Native Image and FFI

Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

picol: A Tcl interpreter in 500 lines of code

Comments