Tcl vs. Lua
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From: Donal K. Fellows on 30 Dec 2005 17:38 Cameron Laird wrote: > Lua is tops for "easy integration with C/C++". Tcl is almost > as simple. Tcl, as it happens, offers at least a half-dozen > distinct idioms for Tcl-C co-operation. One of these is > called, "stubs". Lua lacks stubs, to the best of my knowledge > (although only straightforward if tedious effort lies in the > way of someone who wants to endow Lua with stubs). Stubs is in part an attitude to backward compatability that is oriented to very stable APIs and heavy production use. Actually stubbing an API isn't very hard; you use automated tools to do most of the maintenance after all. But keeping those promises you made by adopting a stubbed API, well, that's a different story altogether. FWIW, most commercial software is nothing like as stable as Tcl, even if we restrict ourselves to examining just the API (and leave out things like propensity to crash, etc.) To see what I mean by this, you have to realize that code that was compiled to binary form against Tcl 8.1 (i.e. perhaps as far back as May 1999) will still probably work if loaded into the CVS HEAD version of 8.5, over six and a half years later. (Of course, if we talk about source compatability, I've got code that was written against Tcl 7.4 which still builds now, over a decade later.) Donal.
From: slebetman@yahoo.com on 30 Dec 2005 19:12 Hmm, I'm going to have to re-arrange the posting order to answer this. So is this "middle posting"? Cameron Laird wrote: > In article <1135902376.793251.228540(a)g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>, > slebetman(a)yahoo.com <slebetman(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> It seems Lua's strengths is smaller footprint and better performance than > >> TCL. And they said it runs on mobile devices too. TCL is too slow for mobile > >> devices, I was told on here. > > <snip> > >even less resource than Tcl. But saying Tcl is slow for mobile devices > >is just plain wrong since the same mobile devices are usually designed > >to run Java. > > > > Please point me to the person who told you that, "TCL is too > slow for mobile devices". Lisa Pearlson. > As it stands, that's simply not true. I also said that it is not true. > >I'd think Tcl would be perfect for this since this sort of stuff > >involves a lot of text processing. > > slebetman, do you truly believe that Tcl is inappropriate for > construction of installers because Tcl makes "text processing" > too difficult? I don't see how you can interpret the phrase "Tcl would be perfect" to mean "Tcl is inappropriate". So let me rephrase what I said by paraphrasing you: Tcl is inappropriate for construction of installers because Tcl makes "text processing" easy. > That doesn't make sense to me--particularly not with the evidence of > <URL: http://wiki.tcl.tk/1896 >. Doesn't make sense to me too since Lua is not as 'EIAS' as Tcl.
From: slebetman@yahoo.com on 31 Dec 2005 01:29 slebetman(a)yahoo.com wrote: > > >I'd think Tcl would be perfect for this since this sort of stuff > > >involves a lot of text processing. > > > > slebetman, do you truly believe that Tcl is inappropriate for > > construction of installers because Tcl makes "text processing" > > too difficult? > > I don't see how you can interpret the phrase "Tcl would be perfect" to > mean "Tcl is inappropriate". So let me rephrase what I said by > paraphrasing you: Tcl is inappropriate for construction of installers > because Tcl makes "text processing" easy. > Heh.. sorry, the problem with paraphrasing is that sometimes you paraphrase too much or too little. What I meant to say was: Tcl is appropriate for construction of installers because Tcl makes "text processing" easy. (delete the 'in' in 'inappropriate')
From: David N. Welton on 31 Dec 2005 03:07
slebetman(a)yahoo.com wrote: >>Please point me to the person who told you that, "TCL is too >>slow for mobile devices". > Lisa Pearlson. >>As it stands, that's simply not true. > I also said that it is not true. In case you hadn't seen it, I wrote a sort of small cousin to Tcl called Hecl that runs in J2ME environments: www.hecl.org It's not a speed demon, but it's a very dynamic scripting language written on top of Java, and it's still usable on my relatively low-end Nokia 3100. If you have an environment where Tcl itself runs, it's fast enough for a whole lot of things. Where it isn't, most other scripting languages aren't likely to be either, and if you want to be *fast*, you want to rewrite that code in C in any case - something that Tcl lets you do with relative ease. -- David N. Welton - http://www.dedasys.com/davidw/ Linux, Open Source Consulting - http://www.dedasys.com/ |