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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

I was surprised when I started working at aol a few years ago how much of the legacy infrastructure runs on tcl. They had a configuration management and process load balancing system that was written in the 90s that as far as I know is still being used to push out updates to stuff like AIM to this day.

It might be interesting to hear one of the old school aol guys talk about it now that they’re decomming a lot of that finally. There was a lot of interesting stuff there that should have been open sourced decades ago and never was.

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https://github.com/aolserver

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AOLServer was actually bought by AOL; originally it was NaviServer. It was open sourced in 1999 by AOL.

It's a fantastic server, imo, and some of the technology developed for it were eventually brought into the Tcl core (not exactly, but the general approaches) when multi-threading was added. At least, that's my understanding.

AOLServer was great! I used it for a ton of stuff, the most complex being a marketplace for data. It was almost trivially easy to do fast, maintainable, programmable business logic as part of a complex web site. Having to switch over to the likes of Flask on Apache (not that Flask isn't a decent framework) was a major step back for development, testing and maintenance.

Wow, that takes me back! Wrote a fair bit of code on AOLserver.

Yeah I know about that, but there was a lot more sort of devops before devops was a thing tools written in tcl as well there.

What sorts of things did these tools do?

I'm obviously aware you can't be precisely specific, but I imagine that the level of detail you _can_ share is probably still very interesting.

One of the most popular "devops before devops was a thing" tools was Expect, which simulated an interactive session over Telnet or SSH. It effectively allowed ops to automate anything that could be done in a terminal.

Expect is a great tool and was widely used for such automation (including by EDA companies - along with Tcl), I've read. I tried it some and read the book about Expect by Don Libes, Expect's creator. A very good book, with a unique writing style, that I somewhat can't find words to describe well.

Do you know anyone at AOL who might be receptive to a request to open source their legacy Tcl code?

This may or may not be what you're looking for (you may already be aware of this), but check out the sibling comment in this subthread.

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