ann: Shen/tk 1.0 is available

[dr.mt...@gmail.com]

Shen/tk is available.  See the latest news on the home page.   The software is bundled in with the standard library which is needed to run it.  Go to the download page to load it.  Online documentation here. 

As the news announcement says, this is a type secure platform portable interface to TCL/tk which needs only minor path changes and accommodation for OS features to run under your version of Shen.

This has been tested by me on Shen/SBCL and Shen/Scheme under Windows.  Bruno has got a 'Hello World' button running under MacOS with apparently minimal changes.  He can comment on his experiences here if he wishes as indeed can anybody else.

If anybody feels they can add to the installation documentation or has 'interesting' experiences installing Shen/tk then do write in here.

Mark

[R1P2 M3]

Thanks,

Wonderful news!

Tk, despite being Old, 

may still be the best thing in this corner of the galaxy!

[dr.mt...@gmail.com]

It is indeed a golden oldie from the 90s.   The decision to base communication on file to file transmission (FFT)

is controversial but it has paid off in terms of portability.  Interestingly ChatGPT gave a good account of 

why FFT is frowned on.  You can get it by asking 

  Why is communication through files frowned on as a means of communication between programs?  

You'll get a detailed answer.    The main point in favour here is the ability to sustain communication within

the KL instruction set.  The arguments against from ChatGPT don't apply here except in two areas; performance 

and concurrency.   Disk writing is slow.  But for human interaction through a GUI, it is humanly instantaneous.  Generating the GUIs takes a second or two.  This is partly because I've put a delay into the TCL event loop of 0.01s

to save cycles when idle and I may cut that to 0.001s.  

Concurrency only kicks in when you've got two processes competing for the TCL/tk event loop.   At the moment

any attempt to communicate to TCL/tk while another Shen process is communicating would put the later

call on standby until a space is cleared.  I don't see any problem there.

TCL/tk is not fast anyway.   I don't think it would be suitable  for CPU intensive graphics like modelling air flow

over a wing. But is great for what it does - providing GUIs.   Shen/tk rationalises TCL/tk, cuts out a lot of ugly

stuff and allows you to produce type secure GUIs.  The IDE for Shen/tk is type secure and takes (so far) about

79,000 inferences to prove type secure.

Mark

[R1P2 M3]

Hello, Shens,

I think 'message-by-file' is nowadays a very good solution to connect very dissimilar systems.

In GUI-use I considered this a good way for me, if no one else cared.

I'd remind that modern NVME/SSD's are very fast (in latency), and above that all OS's (like linux)

cache/buffer all write/reads.  ==>  Limit is of RAM-latency.

'Primitive' method is now 'smartest-of-class'!