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Comment by zaf | Hacker News Reader

Well, Lua is moving fast and is lightweight and Tcl is a heavyweight and moving slow.

So the momentum is about the same and therefore both are relevant.

But isn't the whole point of Tcl to be a lightweight embedded scripting language?

No doubt it's not going to be dethroned in any way from the numerous industry tools (most CAD systems support it for example) but if you want to embed a scripting language, is there any reason to use Tcl over Lua these days?

Tcl was never lightweight. If you know how it works internally, you know that it consumes more memory and more processing time than most other scripting languages.

As an example, a few years back some coworkers and I were interviewing a candidate and he used a lookup take to avoid having to constantly calculate sin and cos. We wrote some tests to discover what the performance improvement was and found out there was none. It was slower to read a value out of an array than it was to calculate the sin or cos of a value.

Tcl might have been a good option back in the day, but they just don't keep up with everyone else, both in terms of performance and feature set.

> a few years back

Have you even looked at it recently? Just curious.

I would assume caching calls to sin/cos wouldn't be performant in any language, including C.

Thats simply not true. Tcl was pretty heavy in the 90s, but its always been comparable to Perl, and slightly better than python. I would be EXTREMELY curious to see what TCL version you were running, and for what values of sin/cos. EDIT: Here is a benchmark that shows TCL/Lua both in a good light for hash table lookups. http://playcontrol.net/opensource/LuaHashMap/benchmarks.html

Expect is still pretty nice:

http://www.nist.gov/el/msid/expect.cfm

Exploring Expect by Don Libes, the principal author of Expect, is a classic among tech books:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565920903.do

That's why I learned Tcl. It's far from the only thing I used Tcl for...

Perhaps it's a matter of "too little too late" to have a significant effect on Tcl's adoption rate, but in versions 8.5[1] and 8.6[2], Tcl gained a number of language-level features that, as a language, seem to put in on the same level as ES6 and other modern scripting languages. Highlights include lambdas, coroutines and stackless evaluation.

[1] http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.5.html

[2] http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.6.html

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