Feb 2023 Tcl Meetup notes

tcl meetup 2023-02-14 (tuesday 14th february 2023 1800 utc)

topics

unicode support

unicode in tcl 9 , (apn).

should we skip 8.7 ?

who in particularly needs 8.7 as opposed to 9.0, and why?

implications of tip 346

conflict with tip 601.

tip 346 not marked as provisional for tcl 8.7

why would -strict be appropriate for tcl 9, given the existence of tip 601?

implications of tip 481

sample extension .

Extension go BOOM.

(am: if we run out of material to discuss only) embedding tcl and tk in a program, especially what to do with the start-up scripts

this is a topic that arises from my fortran/tcl/tk interfacing, so it may be rather specialised ;).

Notes from today's meeting

(I forgot to write down the attendance list.) Ashok, Nathan, Joe, Kevin, Brian, Rolf, Scott, Brad, Schelte, Dan, Shaun (Who did I miss?)

Discussed/debated TIP 656 (alternative for TIP 641,346). There was general agreement that 656 is a better approach. Joe suggested there should be a profile providing a callback mechanism to handle encoding errors. There was agreement that the already read bad data be available somehow. Tip 653 is best path to start.

Joe emphasized(!!!) the need for a strong leader to keep the core development on track. It was proposed that an informational TIP be written. Joe agreed to do this.

Rolf bought up the issue with the magical behavior of TIP 481 leading to fatal errors. There was general agreement that TIP 481 was a bad idea, violating the principle of "least surprise." It was suggested that it should be under a configure option (tclconfig) that extension maintainers can proactively decide to use or not.

Kevin suggested that internal Tcl strings should reject (raise an error) with code points above ~24-bit. (Kevin: correct me if I got this wrong.)

ToDo

• Need to address writing an obj >2Gb to a channel. Currently crashes.
• Need to identify what is still left to do for 9.0.