Many years ago, I worked at a company that used Tcl as the scripting language for its primary product. At one point, a hotshot product manager started agitating to replace it with something more modern. He claimed that Tcl was dying because (wait for it) there were no books being published about it at the time. I guess he was wrong ... :-)

New version of AOLServer incoming?

I wonder when Linux distros will start shipping 9.0 or 9.1. Even Arch is still stuck on 8.6, despite 9.0 being released two years ago.

The little language that could.

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

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.

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

I'm familiar with Tcl because many Cisco routers actually support it as a scripting language.

I tried to get into tk via ruby-tk.

I ended up really disliking tk.

Using ruby-gtk2 and ruby-gtk3 was much nicer. (Sadly, gtk4 sucks, so that's the end of the story there.)

I kind of want a universal toolkit that works everywhere and is also good. Right now I use ... well, either the web (that's ok, though I hate how I can not easily open local files and so forth, without having to use node), or swing via jruby-swing - which semi-sucks, but it also works on windows and it actually is not that bad. (I could use javafx etc... but it is so much easier to get started with swing). I also use libui-ng which is ok but lacks many features, sadly.

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