Version 6 of Application Developer's Wishlist for Tcl

Updated 2002-11-19 17:37:50

Purpose: develop a list of needs and wishes for someone developing stand alone or suites of applications. See also Extension Developer's Wishlist for Tcl and Application User's Wishlist for Tcl. Tk can also be covered here (we can spin it off to a new page if necessary).

What constitutes urgent or required? Good question. What is critical for one person might be fluff or nonsense to someone else. The best I can do is give this kind of guideline. I would personally consider a feature urgent and needed in Tcl if it required the core to be modified, or extensive new code to be developed (as opposed to a wrapping for an existing library), to support some feature that might be useful to more than one customer.

Tcl 9.0 Wishlist would, in my mind, be a subset of the total wishlist.


Urgent/required features missing in Tcl

  1. Support for OO development. Minimal OO requirements for Tcl is the start of some work on defining this.
  2. More basic functions that the Tcl programmer can invoke. What, specifically though, needs to be added?
  3. Native cross-platform support for drag and drop in Tk, including suitable default bindings for some widgets (text, entry widgets in particular), and library procedures where necessary to make it easy for other widgets to be made drag'n'drop aware.

Features that would be useful/helpful/cute but not necessary

  1. I would put bundling itcl or other extensions into this category myself. This is because an application developer can make use of technologies like TclKit, Freewrap, the TclWrap, etc. to create a stand alone bundle of code. Having one or more existing extensions guaranteed to be present on the desktop if Tcl is there becomes, in my mind, a helpful, but not critical/necessary wish.

Joe's Current Wish List...

  1. A "file truncate" command. --> see ftruncate in TclX
      NOTE: I meant a truncate command that is in the core, is fully cross platform, and operates on an open file_id (I have part of an implementation for Win32 done already).
  1. An "lsearch -nocase" option, for uniformity with string match.
  2. Bug fixes to make loading/unloading/reloading Tcl/Tk work properly.
  3. Blue Sky #1: all "known issues" fixed.
  4. Blue Sky #2: fully thread-safe/bulletproof Tk.
   JJM

  1. a built in debugger ala perl that lets you single step and examine variables. TclPro, RamDebugger, idebug, etc. all fall short