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TCL9 Binaries

About

These Tcl 9 builds are provided to offer convenient and optimized Tcl/Tk 9 distributions for various deployment scenarios.

Our goal is to provide the TCL community a repository with reproducable builds for various TCL packages.

Additionally, we are building a TCL distribution with some popular libraries like tcllib or tcltls, alongside some useful utilities for users to run legacy TCL scripts or write new TCL apps even faster.

The Packages provided are hosted in an S3 Object storage bucket hosted in Europe by OVH, and are signed with our PGP Signing Key - to verify builds see Here

Installation options

Builds are distributed though a few different means to cover most user use cases. Packages for Linux distributions are not provided but enough options are available:

  • Binary archives provide bin/,lib/,include/,share/ folders for users to install at their convienience
  • Single file interpreters (Kit)
  • TCL Wrapper script (tclshw or wishw) that will download a local TCL Kit, in the same fashion as tools like Maven or Gradle Wrapper.

Release: TCL 9.0.1 / 250501

This Release uses TCL 9.0.1 as baseline Version and provides following packages:

Package Version Platform Download
TCL9 shared 9.0.1 RHEL8 Download | Checksum | Signature
TCL9 static 9.0.1 RHEL8 Download | Checksum | Signature
TCL9 shared 9.0.1 Mingw32 Win64 Download | Checksum | Signature
TCL9 static 9.0.1 Mingw32 Win64 Download | Checksum | Signature
TK9 shared 9.0.1 RHEL8 Download | Checksum | Signature
TK9 static 9.0.1 RHEL8 Download | Checksum | Signature
TK9 shared 9.0.1 Mingw32 Win64 Download | Checksum | Signature
TK9 static 9.0.1 Mingw32 Win64 Download | Checksum | Signature
TCL9 KIT 9.0.1 RHEL8 Download | Checksum | Signature
TCL9 KIT 9.0.1 Mingw32 Win64 Download | Checksum | Signature
TK9 KIT 9.0.1 RHEL8 Download | Checksum | Signature
TK9 KIT Light 9.0.1 RHEL8 Download | Checksum | Signature
TK9 KIT 9.0.1 Mingw32 Win64 Download | Checksum | Signature
TK9 KIT Light 9.0.1 Mingw32 Win64 Download | Checksum | Signature

TCL9/Tk9 Binary Archives

Binary Archives for TCL9 and Tk9 are build for both Linux and Windows Platforms:

  • Linux binaries are build under a Rocky Linux 8 Environment (RHEL8), which should provide compatibility with most user's distributions
  • Windows binaries are cross-compiled from RockyLinux 8 using Mingw compiler.

For both platforms, static and shared variants are provided:

  • Shared builds are recommended for scenarios where the build libraries are installed in a location available in the user's environment (For example system-wide installation with libraries in /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib, or with LD_LIBRARY_PATH configured in a .bashrc or .zshrc file)
  • Static builds are heavier in size but easier to use since users can directly invoke the tclsh or wish interpreters. They are also used to produce single file tcl applications (TCL Kit) via the zipfs package.

TCL9 Archives

To install a binary archive, just unpack the tarball in a folder and setup your environment:

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$ wget https://kissb.s3.de.io.cloud.ovh.net/tcl9/9.0.1/250501/tcl9-x86_64-redhat-linux-rhel8-shared-9.0.1.tar.gz
$ tar xvaf tcl9-x86_64-redhat-linux-rhel8-shared-9.0.1.tar.gz
$ export PATH=$(pwd)/tcl9-x86_64-redhat-linux-rhel8-shared/bin:$PATH
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$(pwd)/tcl9-x86_64-redhat-linux-rhel8-shared/lib # only required for shared packages, consider adding to .bashrc
$ tclsh9.0 # Run TCLSH interpreter

By default the tclsh interpreter is not present in the bin/ folder, you can add it if you want to make tclsh by default tclsh9:

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$ ln -s  tcl9-x86_64-redhat-linux-rhel8-shared/bin/tclsh9.0  tcl9-x86_64-redhat-linux-rhel8-shared/bin/tclsh

If you are using windows, download a windows archive and run the tclsh90 or tclsh90s interpreters. For example with a static archive:

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PS D:\> wget https://kissb.s3.de.io.cloud.ovh.net/tcl9/9.0.1/250501/tk9-x86_64-w64-mingw32-win64-static-9.0.1.zip
PS D:\> Expand-Archive -Path tk9-x86_64-w64-mingw32-win64-shared-9.0.1.zip -DestinationPath .

Tk9 Archives

TK9 Archives are build for Linux and Windows as for Tcl9, in shared and static variants.

Warning

When using shared variants, make sure the the TCL9 installation is available in and setup properly (see archive installation).

To use TK9 archives, make sure that TCL9 is installed - in case you are using a shared TCL9 archive, don't forget to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable as described previously.

To easily get started, you can use a static build, however if TCL9 is not installed some standard libraries like Itcl won't be available:

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$ wget https://kissb.s3.de.io.cloud.ovh.net/tcl9/9.0.1/250501/tk9-x86_64-redhat-linux-rhel8-static-9.0.1.tar.gz
$ tar xvaf tk9-x86_64-redhat-linux-rhel8-static-9.0.1.tar.gz
$ export PATH=$(pwd)/tk9-x86_64-redhat-linux-rhel8-static-9.0.1/bin:$PATH
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$(pwd)/tk9-x86_64-redhat-linux-rhel8-static-9.0.1/lib # only required for shared packages, consider adding to .bashrc
$ wish9.0 # Run Wish interpreter

On windows, the same applies, note that for static builds the whish interpreter is called wish90s.exe instead of wish90.exe:

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PS D:\> wget https://kissb.s3.de.io.cloud.ovh.net/tcl9/9.0.1/250501/tk9-x86_64-w64-mingw32-win64-static-9.0.1.zip
PS D:\> Expand-Archive -Path tk9-x86_64-w64-mingw32-win64-static-9.0.1.zip -DestinationPath .
PS D:\> tk9-x86_64-w64-mingw32-win64-static-9.0.1\bin\wish90s.exe

TCL9/Tk9 Single File (TclKit)

An alternative way to quickly run TCL9/Tk9 is to run a single file application which contains the whole TCL environment.

The TCL Kit is a statically build TCL interpreter, it can be used to produce new single file applications with the user's application or libraries.

For TK kits, two types of TK Kits are build:

  • Light kits marked -light are only produced using wish static and include the standard tcl library
  • Standard kits (not light) are produced with wish static and include tcl library extra libraries like itcl

Users who want to create their own build using only the basic Tk distribution can use the light kit.

For example on a linux system:

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$ wget https://kissb.s3.de.io.cloud.ovh.net/tcl9/9.0.1/250501/tclkit9-x86_64-redhat-linux-rhel8-9.0.1
$ chmod +x tclkit9-x86_64-redhat-linux-rhel8-9.0.1
$ ./tclkit9-x86_64-redhat-linux-rhel8-9.0.1 # Run TCLSH interpreter

# If you have hadded ~/.local/bin in your path, you can also name the kit "tclsh9.0"
$ wget https://kissb.s3.de.io.cloud.ovh.net/tcl9/9.0.1/250501/tclkit9-x86_64-redhat-linux-rhel8-9.0.1 -O ~/.local/bin/tclsh9.0
$ chmod +x ~/.local/bin/tclsh9.0
$ tclsh9.0

TCL/Tk Wrapper

An alternative way to run tcl in a project folder is to use a wrapper script, in the same fashion as build systems like gradle or maven do.

The wrapper scripts are simple bash scripts called tclshw and wishw which download a Tcl/Tk single file kit to run a provided script. They can safely be commited to GIT.

TCL9

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$ curl -o- https://tcl9.kissb.dev/get/tclshw | bash # Install the wrapper script
$ ./tclshw SCRIPT # Run tclsh

TK9

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$ curl -o- https://tcl9.kissb.dev/get/wishw | bash # Install the wrapper script
$ ./wishw SCRIPT # Run wish

TCL/Tk Docker Image

Our TCL Build system uses docker as build environment and also provides runtime images.

For TCL scripts, users can easily run using the tclsh images.

Image TCL Version Registry
rleys/kissb-tclsh9-shared:latest 9.0.1 DockerHub
rleys/kissb-tclsh9-static:latest 9.0.1 DockerHub
rleys/kissb-wish9-shared:latest 9.0.1 DockerHub
rleys/kissb-wish9-static:latest 9.0.1 DockerHub

Warning

Note that the image runs script from the /app folder, therefore users must map the local folder containing the tcl scripts to the container's /app directory.

TCL/Tk is installed within the Docker image under the /usr/local directory, alongside a dedicated /install-tcl directory. This latter location provides access to the extracted binaries for further customization or replacement of specific libraries.

Interactive Example

To quickly spin a tclsh interpreter, just run the image in interactive mode with pty allocation. The tclsh interpreter is run through rlwrap to allow command history:

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podman run -it -v $(pwd):/app rleys/kissb-tclsh9-static:latest  # Run REPL

Script Example

To execute a simple "hello world" script, the following command sequence can be employed:

hello.tcl
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puts "Hello from tcl version [info tclversion]"

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podman run -it rleys/kissb-tclsh9-static:latest -v $(pwd):/app ./hello.tcl # Without SELinux
podman run -it rleys/kissb-tclsh9-static:latest -v $(pwd):/app:Z ./hello.tcl # With SELinux

This command initiates a container based on the rleys/kissb-tclsh9-static:latest image. The -it flag enables interactive mode, allocating a pseudo-TTY for seamless interaction. The -v $(pwd):/app argument mounts the current working directory to the /app directory within the container, effectively making the script accessible. Finally, ./hello.tcl specifies the script to be executed within the container's environment.

Note

In case you are running SELinux and are getting "Permission denied" on file execution, add the :Z argument to volume mapping to let podman label the mapping for SELinux

Tip

If your script needs to write data and should run with your local user id, add the -u $(id -u) argument to the run command.

Tk Application

Running Tk applications under Linux is slightly more difficult using docker images since the wish executable should be able to access the display port.

For example running a script in the local folder would give an error accessing display :0

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podman run -it rleys/kissb-wish9-static:latest -v $(pwd):. ./SCRIPT.tcl
application-specific initialization failed: couldn't connect to display ":0"
%

Users can try to run the container in host network mode, however some more issues like SELinux policies might come up.

An easy way to use wish using docker/podman is via distrobox, which is a wrapper around docker/podman which adds usefule extensions to images when running commands, including supporting X11 applications.

To create a distrobox deleted after execution:

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distrobox ephemeral --image rleys/kissb-wish9-static:latest -n wish9 -- wish9.0 SCRIPT.TCL

To create a wish distrobox:

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distrobox create --image rleys/kissb-wish9-static:latest -n wish9

Tip

You can use our .init file directly in the command line, or in a Distrobox manager like Distroshelf: https://tcl9.kissb.dev/get/distrobox-wish9-latest.ini

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distrobox assemble create --file https://tcl9.kissb.dev/get/distrobox-wish9-latest.ini

To enter the box, run the script then exit:

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distrobox enter wish9 -- wish9.0 hello.tcl

Issue reporting and Contributions

For feedback, requests and issues please use the Github issue tracker

https://github.com/richnou/kissb-tcl