Tcl/Tk has got to be the easiest GUI system out there; you can get simple stuff going with no effort - nothing I've seen comes close to that simplicity.
I once had an O'Really book named 'Perl/Tk'. I mean, I still have it somewhere... I've the feeling reading through it will maybe become my AI recovery therapy at some point?
Congrats to the community and the core team. Their dedication to maintaining Tcl/Tk as a gold standard of stability, pragmatism, and lightweight cross-platform development is inspiring.
The cool thing is that even if you take something arguably super modern, like the latest Claude models, it is able to write Tcl/tk applications for you that you might not have done at that level in the past. With tests in tcltest too.
If you understand how generative models and agentic coding works, it's not a surprise. But for some reason it's still mind boggling to think that you can take very old stuff and build impressive programs.
I haven't tested this recently, but I bet it’s equally capable of writing custom Tcl extensions using the C API. Given how stable and clean the Tcl C interface has always been, it’s probably a perfect use case for LLM generation.
Yeah should work. So that makes it possible to do literally anything. Tcl always had one foot in the old days and one foot in the modern era. It's not like ALGOL or anything.
Excellent to read Tk is getting better acessibility support. I love using it for quick little Perl/Tk GUI applications but I'm also slowly going blind from retinal tearing. It's good to see progress in some GUI toolkits when major desktops like KDE have dropped accessibility in their latest releases.
FFS, I clicked around for a few minutes and not a single screenshot of what the GUI toolkit is capable of. Even the highlights’ “Themed, Truly Native User Interfaces” chapter and the freaking docs that describe the widgets do not show a single screenshot. I’m shaking my head in disbelief.
Good to see it's getting some modern support.
https://blog.gbacon.com/publications/2000-perl-journal-tktk/
“Tcl tends to get ported to weird places like routers.” (Larry Wall, October 1997)
https://newsgrouper.org/%3C119gpah$3eu5q$1@dont-email.me%3E (Tcl) and
https://newsgrouper.org/%3C119gpbh$3eu5q$2@dont-email.me%3E (Tk).
Kudo’s to Mr Osterhout’s long lived legacy
If you understand how generative models and agentic coding works, it's not a surprise. But for some reason it's still mind boggling to think that you can take very old stuff and build impressive programs.
Some throwbacks of his from 1999:
https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/aolserver/introduction-1.ht...
https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/aolserver/introduction-2.ht...
The startup I joined in 1999 had its own application server loosely based on AOLServer architecture.
We had Apache + mod_tcl, IIS with our own ISAPI extension, then in box connections for all major RDMS across all key UNIXes and Windows NT/2000.
Some left to join companies doing Vignette projects, others eventually created OutSystems redoing the same ideas, but with the newly released .NET.
However it was also a lesson in performance issues, and the constant pressure to rewrite Tcl code into C extensions.
Was great for rapid prototyping and a/b testing in volume. Not sure I'd pick it ever again for anything, but it was interesting for sure.
See: https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/GSoC+Idea%3A+Tk+Backend+for+t...
i'd expect sdl, given wider platform coverage (e.g. mobile), more system integration (e.g. clipboard), and an existing port (https://androwish.org/home/dir?ci=trunk&name=jni%2Fsdl2tk)
..... but they do not come with Next Scripting Framework.
There was a new release on September 16, 2026