Modern alternatives to "big tclsh" and "big wish"

[Until quite recently, Expect was most often a "big tclsh".]

A big tclsh or big wish is a term often used when referring to the practice of statically linking into a single executable additional extensions.

[How does this compare to Starpacks? From a user's point of view? From a developer's point of view?]

Good questions. Let's see - some differences are:

• a big tclsh/wish is still installed across a variety of directories, while a starpack is, in general, one file.
• a big tclsh/wish is still just an interpreter, awaiting applications. A starpack could be that, but is probably more frequently an application and the tcl interpreter.
• a big tclsh/wish is going to take custom work to package up and ship. A starpack is just a single file, in general, that gets packaged up and shipped.

Don Porter (and Jeffrey Percival) nicely illustrate re-engineering of an existing "big wish" application to use a loadable package [L1 ].

DGP Note that reference only starts the journey that can be taken.

Category Example Category Deployment