TacTCL 0.3.4

(pronounce "tactical")

A small, free Tcl/Tk distribution with some popular Tcl/Tk packages built from sources.

IT IS NOT A REPLACEMENT FOR ActiveState Tcl. If you need a production-ready, stable version of Tcl, it's probably better to rely on commercially supported packages such as ActiveState's.

TacTCL's goal is to gather several popular, reasonably stable packages and compile them on your system with your available compiler, instead of relying on precompiled binaries.

The policy of TacTCL is that the default configuration should provide working, stable versions of main packages, but that the user should be able to easily try any configuration of her liking by editing a simple build.cfg text file. Contributors are welcome to propose newer default configurations after testing them.

tactcl provides native and JVM builds for Tcl. For the JVM builds, it uses a TclJava fork from TacTCL's author, that supports recent versions of Tcl (8.6) and of the JDK (JDK 10 and newer, with support for JDK 4- dropped). It was tested successfully with JDK 17 and Tcl 8.6.12.

The JVM builds with modern JDK and last versions of Tcl (8.6 with TclOO support) are a unique feature of TacTCL (currently not available in other Tcl distributions, at the author's knwoledge).

Properly used, they can provide a safe environment with a server-side Java security manager, and Safe Tcl running on the JVM for the controlled execution of untrusted scripts (with smooth communication between Java and Tcl layers)

This is a work in progress and still experimental (contributors are welcome). It should work on any Unix-like system (Linux, BSD, OSX) with a Java Development Kit installed. Windows native is not supported for the moment (the Unix make command is required, preferrably GNU make), but a workaround is to use Cygwin or a Linux image on Windows (on Windows 10+). One can install make and other tools on Windows with the chocolatey package manager.

To get started

For the impatient

Copy the file build.cfg.dist under the name build.cfg, check it up and configure it according to your environment and needs. The default values should be fine for Tcl, Tk and TclJava, but not for make all.

Just type make The sources from a Tcl stable version will be extracted, and all what you need (binaries, libraries, header files) will be created in the local directory. Especially, you will find the binaries under local/bin.

If anything goes wrong, you can make clean or even make clean-all and retry make. If it fails again, you are welcome to emit an issue.

You can copy the directories wherever you need (e.g. under /usr/local). TacTCL doesn't currently perform an automatic installation in system directories to avoid overwriting a working installation. It is up to the user to copy the tools under their system directories.

For installing Tcl/Tk, type make tk

For installing TclJava (TclBlend and Jacl), type make tcljava

For installing well-behaved packages (at the author's knowledge), type make stable

For installing everything, type make all (you may experience errors depending on your environment, this early version of TacTCL doesn't take care of missing dependencies of the packages it gathers).

For a list of all the available commands: make help

You can test jtclsh and jaclsh (the JVM Tcl interpreters from Tclblend and Jacl) with these commands:

$ ./local/bin/jtclsh 
% puts $tcl_version
8.6

$ ./local/bin/jaclsh 
% puts $tcl_version
8.0

To get a more user's friendly tcl shell

(currently recognized by tclsh and jtclsh but not by jaclsh):

cp tclshrc $HOME/.tclshrc # don't forget the dot in the target

Edit the first line (lappend autopath) of $HOME/.tclshrc to the proper path of the Tcl package root on your system (this must be currently done manually; this should be improved later)

If you need more control

Edit build.cfg:

• comment or uncomment the lines depending on the needed tools
• edit the installation path: PREFIX

Edit versions.cfg

• set the desired versions for the tools (so you can compile a prefered version of Tcl or of some packages for your system)

Once everything is set up, launch make help to see the list of available build targets, and check the configuration.

make will attempt to build all the targets specified in build.cfg

Test tcljava with jrunscript

jrunscript is the official JDK script runner for JSR223 compliant languages. The JSR223 support of tcljava is still partial and in development, therefore you may experience errors when trying this solution for the moment.

If jrunscript is available with your JDK, you can use it.

With the maven installation (on MSYS2/Windows, replace $HOME by $HOMEDRIVE$HOMEPATH):

jrunscript -cp $HOME/.m2/repository/com/github/fabriceducos/tactcl/tcljava/tcljava/1.5.0/tcljava-1.5.0.jar:$HOME/.m2/repository/com/github/fabriceducos/tactcl/tcljava/tclblend/1.5.0/tclblend-1.5.0.jar:$HOME/.m2/repository/com/github/fabriceducos/tactcl/tcljava/jacl/1.5.0/jacl-1.5.0.jar -Djava.library.path=$HOME/.m2/repository/com/github/fabriceducos/tactcl/tcljava/tclblend/1.5.0:$HOME/.m2/repository/com/github/fabriceducos/tactcl/tcljava/jacl/1.5.0 -l tclblend

(one can put -l jacl instead of -l tclblend for using the jacl interpreter)

If tcljava is installed elsewhere on your system, just adapt the paths accordingly.

CAVEAT: there seems to be a bug in at least some implementations on MacOSX: the -Djava.library.path flag has no effect on these implementations, and the JDK only looks for native libraries in some fixed paths, e.g. /Library/Java/Extensions and /Users/username/Library/Java/Extensions. If you experience an UnsatisfiedLinkError despite of providing the proper java.library.path, you should set the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to the same value as java.library.path (or extend it depending on your needs), or alternatively store your native library (libtclblend.dylib) in one of the Java/Extensions directories.

This bug wasn't observed on other systems (e.g. Linux/Ubuntu or Windows/MSYS2).

Requirements

• A modern JDK (JDK 5+, JDK 8+ recommended)
• A modern version of Tcl (8.6+ recommended)
• A system with GNU make installed (other versions of make may work, but none has been tested yet)
• the following tools (usually available or easily installable on most Unix-like systems): unzip and tar
• later on, wget and/or curl may be required for automatic downloading of new versions of packages

What is installed by default by this version of TacTCL

• tcl: the core langage
• tk: the popular Tk toolkit
• ck: a Tk clone for the console, based on curses (currently no version tag available)
• tclreadline: a command line interpreter facility for tcl (syntax highlighthing and history-aware interpreter)
• expect: the famous automation tool based on Tcl
• tcllib: standard tcl library
• bwidget: a cross-platform widget toolkit for Blender (currently GPL2)
• critcl: package for on-the-fly compilation of tcl scripts
• tclx: popular extensions for Tcl

NOTES

• Before version 0.3.0, TacTCL was relying on another project Jaclin (Jacl INside), that was a fork of TclJava, migrated from SVN to GIT with reposurgeon and updated for modern versions of the JDK and of TCL.
• TacTCL started as a small TCL distribution including several general-purpose Tcl tools and TclJava.
• Both projects proved difficult to maintain and build separately. TacTCL 0.3.0 is basically a merge of TacTCL 0.2.9 and Jaclin 0.1.4.

COMPATIBILITY

This distribution has been successfully built on the following systems:

• MacOSX Monterey (12.4) with OpenJDK Zulu 17.32.13 (JDK 17.0.2)
• Ubuntu on Windows 10 with AdoptOpenJDK 11.0.6
• MSYS2 on Windows 10 with OpenJDK 17.0.3 Server VM Temurin
• Ubuntu 21.10 with OpenJDK 17.0.3 Server VM