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by nickpsecurity 3704 days ago
I never thought of Tcl to be used in safety- or security-critical systems. It's certainly simple and easy to use. We played with it for agent-oriented programming back in the day. Had serious, design-level issues for security and was harder to parse than some others (eg LISP's).

Rather than just a critique, I'm curious where and how you use it with what benefits it brings you? I could certainly see it in UI or untrusted parts. Maybe also during development in a way that auto-generates C or something that runs in production.
1 comments
tclmeelmo 3704 days ago
I only use it like you guessed (and what I think it's best/appropriate for): gluing things together, embedded scripting, and Tk on internal tools/gizmos and early prototypes. I wasn't clear earlier, sorry.

To be perfectly fair, on the decision matrix Tcl gets a helpful boost due to my own familiarity with it and playing nice with C; if a butterfly had flapped it's wings just a little bit differently or I was starting out today I would probably be using something else. Probably Java. Ada would be great, but the lack of ecosystem diversity makes me apprehensive.

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nickpsecurity 3704 days ago
Gotcha. Look into REBOL/RED while you're at it. RED is a REBOL clone/modification for system programming. They're LISP like advantages without the parenthesis and having small footprint. RED is already used in one OS project. I keep thinking of modifying it for system use. People keep telling me to check out Nim as it's like Pascal and Python combined with extra safety, macros, and C code generation.

So, there you have it: REBOL, RED, and Nim. Maybe Ivory language from Galois, too, but you need to know Haskell for that.

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tclmeelmo 3704 days ago
I remember playing around with REBOL a long time ago and it seemed useful and practical, but for reasons long forgotten I never used it. Maybe licensing? RED does look cool and I hadn't heard of it before, thanks for the tip.

Don't have any experience with Nim, but I share your interest for the same reasons. Haskell and I don't get along, maybe I'm too old and set in my ways?

Did you catch the link to/discussion of Little shared on here a few days ago? It might be of interest. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11530097

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nickpsecurity 3704 days ago
Me too on Haskell. Mainly plan to try other two. Saw Little but didn't really get it past adoption. Then, your comment led me to the Why page which told me that was exactly the point. Along with programming in the large support. Funnier when I found out the boss wrote that.

I'd say it's not a good language to go with today for same reasons I'd say Tcl isn't. It's an interesting improvement especially to get better syntax with legacy compatibility with field-proven, TCL modules. And TK is still the shit for portable, easy-to-build GUI's. A TCL shop should definitely experiment with it and maybe incrementally upgrade their code. I think I'd be fine with a more typed, efficient, and fixed version of Tcl for some apps. Especially a command shell replacement or prototyping system.

Just not production unless it's non-critical like what you use it for. I don't even use it to glue to critical things as the glue is part of the TCB to a degree. Gotta find close-to-metal, abstract, typed, efficient, and macro'd stuff to replace it. At least we have contenders.

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