Michael Schlenker has very succinctly stated the need for a rich standard library for Tcl in several usenet postings
He says:
Tcl has two competing groups in the discussion: The embedders that are concerned about startup time, library size, memory footprint and things like that on the one side, the "batteriers-included-huge-stdlib-in-the-core" fraction on the other side. Those targets are impossible to reach at the same time. So instead of making it a problem, try to create a virtue. a) Let the embedders factor out as much functionality as possible from the core into a modular stdlib b) Let the batteries group add as much useful functional as required into a modular stdlib
... and ...
- Integrated, cross platform build system (TEA or better)
- Useful documentation, probably doctools based
- Stubs enabled if at all possible
(sometimes hard or near impossible to achieve)
- Export their own stubs table if their functionality could be useful
- BSD license
- Provides fundamental extra functionality (Thread, msgcat, XML, ASN1,
TclX/Registry/ffidl/Twapi, KBK's localized clock, Datastructures, One or
more OO-Systems, RPC-Support, TLS/Crypto,... )