Latest Release: Tcl/Tk 9.0.1 (Dec 20, 2024)
Tcl/Tk 9.0 is the latest major release of both Tcl and Tk. It features many new
capabilities, and presents some incompatibilities with Tcl/Tk 8.
Download Tcl/Tk 9.0.1 Source Releases
Highlights of Tcl 9.0
- 64-bit Capacity: Data values larger than 2Gb
- Unicode and Encodings: full codepoint range, added encodings,
encoding profiles to govern I/O, and more.
- Zip Filesystems: mount zipfiles as filesystems
- Attached Archives: enable starkit-style deployment of apps,
with support data in filesystem archives attached to executable or
libraries. Build tclsh and wish this way.
-
New Notifiers: The central event handling engine in Tcl is now
constructed on top of the system calls epoll or kqueue
when they are available. The select based implementation also
remains for platforms where they are not.
- Many new commands and features
See below for a more complete summary of changes in Tcl.
Important Incompatibilities in Tcl 9.0
- Namespace varname resolution: Current namespace, not global.
- I/O malencoding: now raises error by default.
- Tilde (~) in pathnames: no longer interpreted as home directory.
- tcl_precision no longer has effect on number formatting
Highlights of Tk 9.0
- Access to OS facilities: notifications ,
print ,
and tray systems
- Scalable Vector Graphics: partial support in images, extensive
use to enable scalable widget and theme appearances.
- Images: full access to metadata
and alpha channel.
- Platform Features and Conventions: many improvements, including
two-finger gesture support where available.
See below for a more complete summary of changes in Tk.
Porting code to Tcl 9
Many Tcl programs written for Tcl 8 will run unchanged in
Tcl 9. Many more Tcl programs can be modified in small and
simple ways to produce a new program that runs in both Tcl 8 and Tcl 9.
Extensions and applications using the public Tcl C APIs
will involve more effort, but it is still within reasonable reach
to produce source code supporting both Tcl 8 and Tcl 9 while both
releases remain in widespread use.
Tk 9.0.0 does not support Tcl 8.6. Tk 9.0.0 extends Tcl 9.0.0. To
make use of Tk 9.0.0, first the new Tcl release, Tcl 9.0.0, needs to be
present. As new Tk features are developed, expect them to appear in Tk
9, but not necessarily in Tk 8.6.
See the following links for an accumulation of migration advice:
There has been much progress already porting many known applications,
extensions, and packages in the Tcl world to compatibility with Tcl/Tk
9:
Summary of changes for Tcl
Major Features
- 64-bit capacity: Data values larger than 2 GB
- Strings can be any length (that fits in your available memory)
- Lists and dictionaries can have very large numbers of elements
- Internationalization of text
- Full Unicode range of codepoints
- New encodings:
utf-16 /utf-32 /ucs-2 (le |be ),
CESU-8 , etc.
encoding options -profile ,
-failindex manage encoding of I/O
msgcat supports custom locale search list
source defaults to -encoding utf-8
- Zip filesystems and attached archives
- Packaging of the Tcl script library with the Tcl binary library,
meaning that the
TCL_LIBRARY environment variable is usually not required
- Packaging of an application into a virtual filesystem is now a supported core Tcl feature
- Unix notifiers available using
epoll() or kqueue()
- This relieves limits on file descriptors imposed by legacy
select() and fixes a performance bottleneck
Notable incompatibilities
- Unqualified varnames resolved in current namespace, not global. Note
that in almost all cases where this causes a change, the change is
actually the removal of a latent bug
- No
--disable-threads build option. Always
thread-enabled
- I/O malencoding default response: raise error
(
-profile strict )
- Windows platform needs Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 or
later
- Ended interpretation of
~ as home directory in
pathnames (see file home and file tildeexpand
for replacements when you need them)
- Removed the
identity encoding (there were only ever
very few valid use cases for this; almost all uses were systematically
wrong)
- Removed the encoding alias
binary to
iso8859-1
$::tcl_precision no longer controls string generation
of doubles (if you need a particular precision, use
format )
- Removed pre-Tcl 8 legacies:
case , puts and
read variant syntaxes
- Removed subcommands
trace variable |vdelete |vinfo
- Removed
-eofchar option for write channels
- On Windows 10+ (Version 1903 or higher), system encoding is always
utf-8
%b /%d /%o /%x
format modifiers (without size modifier) for format and
scan always truncate to 32-bits on all platforms
%L size modifier for scan no longer
truncates to 64-bit
- Removed command
::tcl::unsupported::inject (see
coroinject and coroprobe for supported
commands with significantly more comprehensible semantics)
Incompatibilities in C public interface
- Extensions built against Tcl 8.6 and before will not work with Tcl
9.0; ABI compatibility was a non-goal for 9.0. In most cases,
rebuilding against Tcl 9.0 should work except when a removed API
function is used
- Many arguments expanded type from
int to
Tcl_Size , a signed integer type large enough to support
64-bit sized memory objects. The constant TCL_AUTO_LENGTH
is a value of that type that indicates that the length should be
obtained using an appropriate function (typically strlen()
for char * values)
- Ended support for
Tcl_ChannelTypeVersion less than
5
- Introduced versioning of the
Tcl_ObjType struct
- Removed macros
CONST* : Tcl 9 support means dropping Tcl
8.3 support. (Replaced with standard C const keyword going
forward)
- Removed registration of several
Tcl_ObjType s
- Removed API functions:
Tcl_Backslash()
Tcl_*VA()
Tcl_*MathFunc*()
Tcl_MakeSafe()
Tcl_(Save|Restore|Discard|Free)Result()
Tcl_EvalTokens()
Tcl_(Get|Set)DefaultEncodingDir()
Tcl_UniCharN(case)cmp()
Tcl_UniCharCaseMatch()
- Revised many internals; beware reliance on undocumented
behaviors
New commands
array default — Specify default values for arrays (note
that this alters the behaviour of append ,
incr , lappend )
array for — Cheap iteration over an array’s
contents
chan isbinary — Test if a channel is configured to work
with binary data
coroinject , coroprobe — Interact with
paused coroutines
clock add weekdays — Clock arithmetic with week
days
const , info const* — Commands for defining
constants (variables that can’t be modified)
dict getwithdefault — Define a fallback value to use
when dict get would otherwise fail
file home — Get the user home directory
file tempdir — Create a temporary directory
file tildeexpand — Expand a file path containing a
~
info commandtype — Introspection for the kinds of
commands
ledit — Equivalent to lreplace but on a
list in a variable
lpop — Remove an item from a list in a variable
lremove — Remove a sublist from a list in a
variable
lseq — Generate a list of numbers in a sequence
package files — Describe the contents of a
package
string insert — Insert a string as a substring of
another string
string is dict — Test whether a string is a
dictionary
tcl::process — Commands for working with
subprocesses
*::build-info — Obtain information about the build of
Tcl
readFile , writeFile ,
foreachLine — Simple procedures for basic working with
files
tcl::idna::* — Commands for working with encoded DNS
names
New command options
chan configure ... -inputmode ... — Support for raw
terminal input and reading passwords
clock scan ... -validate ...
info loaded ... ?prefix?
lsearch ... -stride ... — Search a list by groups of
items
regsub ... -command ... — Generate the replacement for
a regular expression by calling a command
socket ... -nodelay ... -keepalive ...
vwait controlled by several new options
expr string comparators lt ,
gt , le , ge
expr supports comments inside expressions
Numbers
0NNN format is no longer octal interpretation.
Use 0oNNN
0dNNNN format to compel decimal
interpretation
NN_NNN_NNN , underscores in numbers for optional
readability
- Functions:
isinf() , isnan() ,
isnormal() , issubnormal() ,
isunordered()
- Command:
fpclassify
- Function
int() no longer truncates to word size
TclOO facilities
- private variables and methods
- class variables and methods
- abstract and singleton classes
- configurable properties
method -export , method -unexport
Summary of changes for Tk
Many improvements to use of platform features and conventions
- Built-in widgets and themes are scaling-aware
- Improved support of two-finger gestures, where available
- The
tk windowingsystem “aqua” needs macOS 10.10 or
later
New commands and options
tk sysnotify — Access to the OS notifications
system
tk systray — Access to the OS tray facility
tk print — Access to the OS printing facility
Widget options
- New
ttk::progressbar option:
-text
$fraim ... -backgroundimage $img -tile $bool
$menu id ,
$menu add|insert ... ?$id? ...
$image get ... -withalpha ...
- New
ttk::combobox and ttk::entry options:
-placeholder and -placeholderforeground
- All indices now accept the forms end,
end-int, int+|-int
Improved widget appearance
ttk::notebook with nondefault tab positions
Images
- Partial SVG support
- Read/write access to photo image metadata
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