Novem

Novem is the core team and maintainer 's code name for the series of branches where we can break binary compatibility while working on things like

  1. Cleaning up the public Tcl C API
  2. Reworking internal and public structures for hopefully enhanced performance.
  3. Compiling Tcl scripts to native code.
  4. Other experimental features.

The end goal is to evolve these into Tcl 9.

The table below is for tracking the list of ideas. Portions of it, maybe even all, should also be added to our Project Ideas for Google Summer of Code.

For ease of exchange please follow the same format for ideas and idea pages as for the GSoC page.

Idea Tracker

IdeaNotesWhoBranchStatus
Sort out 64-bit Tcl API issuesVery disruptive; approach taken might be too extremeDKFnovem-64bit-sizesNot much happening right now

64-bit Sizes

AMG: When I see "novem-64bit-sizes" above, am I to take it that there is a plan (even a vague plan) to support strings/lists longer than 2,147,483,647 bytes/elements? I'm curious how much interest there is in this. Is it an unmotivated wishlist item, or has anyone actually found an application for it? The only thing I can think of is that a Tcl web server might someday want to send or receive a "file" larger than two gigabytes, even if the "file" was generated or processed in memory and not on disk. An example would be data going to and from an SQLite incrblob since the incrblob implementation is buggy w.r.t. channel events.