[johnbuckman]

Ironically, because Tcl was made to run GUIs on very limited hardware (old Unix machines, 30 years ago) it runs really nicely on slow Android tablets.

Its focus on asynchronous programming, rather than relying on threads, really helps, as does the small memory footprint (105mb of RAM used for my app).

Java-based apps on the same tablet that I supply with the espresso machine run at a crawl, whereas my Tcl app feels normal.

[_ph_]

Yes, my experience also always was, that while the pure Tcl code performance isn't great, most Tcl programs perform very well, due to the low resource consumption and overhead.

[pjmlp]

It doesn't help that Google did a pretty lousy job with Dalvik.

If those tablets were running something like Aicas Java runtime, it would be much different.

[johnbuckman]

"Androwish", which is Tcl/Tk ported to Android, runs mostly on the C layer sitting on top of Linux. As such, it's way more "performant" than Java.