[HN Gopher] Critcl - C Runtime in Tcl
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       Critcl - C Runtime in Tcl
        
       Author : ofalkaed
       Score  : 21 points
       Date   : 2025-08-03 19:58 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (andreas-kupries.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (andreas-kupries.github.io)
        
       | forinti wrote:
       | I suppose you would use this to do low level stuff because it's
       | much harder to do in TCL, but it just doesn't feel right.
       | 
       | It makes more sense to me to embed Tk into a C program.
        
         | ofalkaed wrote:
         | Depends on how much C you need, it might make more sense to
         | write a proper Tcl extension and it might make sense to just
         | embed Tcl/Tk but having this middle ground is nice because
         | swinging to the fences is rarely the best course of action.
         | 
         | Critcl looks to be quite nice in those situations when Tcl/Tk
         | is almost but not quite, you get the speed and ease of Tcl/Tk
         | but a little more as well. The big gotcha looks to be having
         | the foresight of identifying when writing a proper Tcl/Tk
         | extension or switching language is the better plan, but this is
         | almost always the big gotcha.
        
       | NelsonMinar wrote:
       | Still in active development, or at least maintenance.
       | https://github.com/andreas-kupries/critcl/commits/master/
        
         | ofalkaed wrote:
         | I don't think it needs much development at this point, it is
         | stable, all it needs to do is keep up with Tcl/Tk development.
         | I just started playing with it two days ago so I might be
         | missing some of its flaws but so far it seems quite mature.
        
       | bb01100100 wrote:
       | I was doing some looping recently with tcl and comparing against
       | another implementation (called Jim [1], a very cool project in
       | its own right) and wondered why datetime formatting was so slow
       | when using `clock format`.
       | 
       | The code at [2] provided an alternative approach using C via
       | critcl. It was interesting to see how malleable tcl can be.
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/msteveb/jimtcl [2] https://wiki.tcl-
       | lang.org/page/speed+up+clock+format+and+clo...
        
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       (page generated 2025-08-03 23:00 UTC)