Purpose: to collect information regarding special tips, techniques, tricks, and got-chas in writing true cross platform Tcl scripts.
Page begun by Larry Virden.
Issues:
Other resources:
Here are some example Tcl applications that run on all of UNIX, Win, and MacOS and which are not merely trivial but demonstrate many of the problems/solutions of cross-platform portability.
- Alphatk [L1 ] is such an application. It is a cross-platform programmer's editor. It has some problems on MacOS, but this is due to a few remaining bugs/issues in MacTk, and not in Alphatk's scripts. It has cross-platform support for things like: executing external scripts, starting up latex processes (and capturing their output), etc.
- tkbiff [L2 ] includes a lot of code to make it work on all platforms. It sounds like a trivial app but it is actually 4300 lines of Tcl. Besides the things Tcl handles automatically, extra coding is necessary for cross-platform issues like : playing audios, fonts, cursors, preference file locations, keyboard/mouse bindings, invoking browsers, dialogues, and diagnostics. Fairly good rosetta stone since it is small and yet demonstrates things like UNIX/Win exec vs Mac-Applescript and Mac-resources.
Please feel free to add anything you can. Hopefully some new tools could be added to the Tcl and Tk core to improve portability!