Tcl 9.0 Beta 1

Draft

Tcl 9.0 is the first major release of Tcl in many years. It contains a number of key features:

64 bit support - elimination of most 32-bit size constraints so that Tcl can process larger data sets
full unicode support (including full emoji support in Tk)
zip filesystem support, including for archives attached to executables (zipkits)
support for a very large number of file descriptors on POSIX platforms which support the kqueue/epoll system calls (a.k.a. the 10k problem).
the removal of many deprecated features

In addition, the companion Tk GUI toolkit contains some significant improvements:

much improved macOS support, allowing the design and implementation of Tcl/Tk apps with a native look and feel
improved X11 look and feel "out of the box"
extended photo image functionality, including support for reading and writing metadata and alpha support
support for reading SVG images
scaling awareness for the Tk core, Ttk widgets, standard dialogs and built-in themes
built-in print support
significantly improved support for scrolling via two-finger gestures on macOS and Windows

Release Candidate 3 - 21 December 2023

Now available at Tcl @ Sourceforge are the RC3 candidate source code distribution pre-releases of Tcl 9.0b1 and Tk 9.0b1 and bundled packages.

These releases are nearly unchanged from RC2. The only changes are in some of the TDBC* packages. It is expected that these release artifacts will be renamed to become the Tcl/Tk 9.0b1 releases in the next several days. Only the most severe problems will stop that now, with remaining bugs deferred to be handled in future releases.

Release Candidate 2 - 14 December 2023

This release candidate is currently being prepared. Aside from bug fixes resulting from the previous release candidate, this one includes Tcl 9.0b1 rc1, Tk 9.0b1 rc1 and common packages that have been migrated to Tcl 9.0. These are included to make it easier to try Tcl9.0b1 with your existing programs, without the need to migrate these packages yourself.

The Tcl 9.0 beta1 rc1 distribution includes the following bundled packages:

Thread - the Thread extension for Tcl 9.0
[incr Tcl] - an object oriented extension for Tcl
SQLite - the most used database engine in the world
tdbc Core - the Tcl database connectivity core package
tdbc SQLite - TDBC SQLite driver
tdbc Postgres - the TDBC Postgres driver
tdbc mysql - the TDBC MySQL driver
tdbc ODBC - the TDBC ODBC driver

The package are built by default, but if you don't need them (or if they won't build on your platform) then remove the corresponding sub-folder from the pkgs folder.

The following packages are pkgs compliant, meaning they can be linked to from the tcl/pkgs folder (or copied there) and they will build along with Tcl:

tdom - XML/DOM processing
tcllib - The Tcl Library, a kitchen-sink of packages
tklib - The Tk Library, a counterpart for tcllib
tclvfs - Tcl Virtual Filesystems tools (used by the xlsx and ooxml packages for reading Excel spreadsheets)

The following packages need to be installed besides Tcl 9.0 and built separately:

Tk - The GUI Toolkit for Tcl
tcltls - TLS socket support
[tklib] - the Tk counterpart to Tcllib - useful tools and widgets
[incr Tk] - Facilities to make Tk widgets with [incr Tcl] objects.

Many other packages have been migrated to Tcl 9.0 and are documented at Porting extensions to Tcl 9.

Release Candidate 1 - 29 November 2023

This is the latest in a sequence of candidate releases leading to the release of Tcl 9.0b1 and TK 9.0b1. Testing of builds and operations on multiple platforms is invited. Open tickets on any problems discovered, or raise the issue in a reply to this message. The aim is to clean up the problems that are easily discovered so that a broader audience receiving the Tcl 9.0b1 and Tk 9.0b1 releases can focus attention on deeper issues needing beta testing to discover.

This pre-release includes a pre-release of the package Thread 3.0b1. The same level of vetting on it is also appreciated.

Primary objective

to enable people to build and test Tcl 9.0 and Tk 9.0 on various platforms

Includes

the Tcl source
the Tk source
the Thread extension for Tcl 9.0
the SQLite 3.44.2 and itcl 4.2.4 bundled packages

Download from

Tcl repository core-9-0-b1-rc branch

Individual distributions of related packages are also available from this location

Release Candidate 0 - 14 November 2023

This is the first of a sequence of candidate releases leading to the release of Tcl 9.0b1. Testing of builds and operations on multiple platforms is invited. Open tickets on any problems discovered, or raise the issue in a reply to this message. The aim is to clean up the problems that are easily discovered so that a broader audience receiving the Tcl 9.0b1 release can focus attention on deeper issues needing beta testing to discover.