🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <23217@usc.edu> papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa) writes:
>One drawback I see at the moment of Tcl vs. Arexx on the Amiga is that the
>former one is not made into a .library. 
>Are you guys at hackercorp working on a Tcl library?

Yes.

Manx 5.0 greatly simplifies the creation of libraries.  You create a .fd
file and the mapfd program, which comes with 5.0, generates the amicall
pragmas for the library.  You use the -qp compiler option to generate
the function prototypes.  Then a bit of monkey business and magic (a
sample shared library, with source, that actually compiles and works is
included in 5.0) and you have a shared library.

I have done almost all of the work necessary to make Tcl and my Tcla
Amiga extension for interprocess communications, windows, menus, gadgets,
fonts, drawing and event loop handling into a shared library.  This mainly
involved moving all global data into ClientData structures associated
with the Tcla extensions.  Fortunately, vanilla Tcl keeps all of its
data in or subordinate to Tcl_Interp data structures, so Tcl itself
requires hardly any diddling to make it work within a shared lib.

I haven't finished the job because I like calling printf and such when
I'm debugging, and doing so from a shared library introduces some
difficulties.  I may have to have the user of the shared library pass
pointers to some functions up to the shared library, that the library can
then call the user-specified functions when it needs to, functions like
write and panic.
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