Why Tcl/Tk does not have a 64-bit distribution?

Georgios Petasis

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Apr 12, 2007, 2:21:21 AM4/12/07

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Hi all,

I downloaded ActivePerl today and I saw that an 64-bit (AMD64) was
available for download. A quick check showed that ActivePython also has
an 64-bit version. Is there a reason for Tcl not to have an 64-bit
release? Is this due to extensions included in ActiveTcl?

George

Donal K. Fellows

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Apr 12, 2007, 4:27:37 AM4/12/07

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The Tcl sources support being built as 64-bit binaries on many
platforms, and I suspect most of the other packages in the ActiveTcl
should support it straight out of the box too. Whether enough do to
support 64-bit builds for all Unix platforms, I don't know. Windows is
a bit different; there are enough changes there for 64-bit-ness that
some of the extensions (especially ones that provide widgets written
in C/C++) may well not be updated yet. Maybe someone who knows more
about iTk/iWidgets and the Vu widgets can tell us more?

Donal.

Jeff Hobbs

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Apr 12, 2007, 8:26:13 PM4/12/07

to Georgios Petasis

The public 64-bit variations of ActivePerl are recent additions, as are
the ActivePython ones. We have had 64-bit versions of ActiveTcl
available for a long time in Enterprise Edition binaries. They simply
have required a higher maintenance load on a per-build basis. We
realize that x64 Linux is fairly common, and this will become one of our
standard public platforms at the next release (which is due hopefully
sooner rather than later).

You will find that Tcl is fairly well staged for 64-bit builds, as is
the TEA build system. You will also find that I make the large majority
of build commits surrounding this as we hit the various issues on ...
"less-common" operating systems.

Jeff

mlt

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Apr 14, 2007, 4:50:13 PM4/14/07

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On 12 Apr., 10:27, "Donal K. Fellows" <donal.k.fell...@man.ac.uk>
wrote:

Tcl 8.4.14 (not 8.4.13) and Tk compile on 64-bit FC6 and Centos4.4
as well as Oratcl does.
BLT has a bug in bltTree.c that is quite easy to fix to get
it compiled (definition of START_LOGSIZE and MAX_LIST_VALUES
has to be put in front of the #if (SIZEOF_VOID_P == 8) ).
On Itcl I could not succeed due to errors in the ./configure
script.
Actually, I am stuck with compiling BLT against ActiveTcl8.4.14,
where I get 32/64-Bit conflicts when BLT tries to bind tk:
/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /opt/ActiveTcl-8.4/lib/libtk8.4.so
when searching for -ltk8.4
/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /opt/ActiveTcl-8.4/lib/libtk8.4.a
when searching for -ltk8.4
So, it is actually really a mess and I would appreciate a 64-bit
ActiveTcl-installation too.

Regards,
mlt

dave

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Apr 16, 2007, 4:34:30 AM4/16/07

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64-bit Tcl/Tk is standard on 64-bit OpenBSD which has no support whatsoever
for 32-bit apps. You can run 32-bit OpenBSD if you want 32-bit apps.

thel...@gmail.com

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Apr 30, 2007, 10:44:26 PM4/30/07

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Score ONE for Oratcl. Oratcl has been 64bit buildable/safe for quite
some time, as my primary development platform is 64-bit solaris. I
personally know that it builds and runs just fine on x86-64 Redhat ES
4.

-Todd