[fpc-devel] TCL [was: Stack dump with possible segfault]

[Tomas Hajny]

On Tue, May 13, 2014 10:54, Johann Glaser wrote:
> Hi!
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> > I'm working on a project with an external library (libtcl, it is
>> written
>> > in C) which creates some problems with back traces for exceptions.
>>  .
>>  .
>>
>> While not completely related to your original topic, I'd like to ask you
>> if you decided knowingly not to use the package "tcl" provided with FPC
>> (and possibly improve / extend it for your target platform) and if so,
>> what were your reasons.
>>
>> I ask because I'm not sure to which extent it's used and/or maintained,
>> especially considering that it supports a fairly limited set of
>> platforms
>> measured by current FPC span and that the included name of the TCL DLL
>> for
>> Win32 does not seem to match currently available TCL version.
>>
>> Should the package not to be useful any longer, we should probably
>> either
>> update it (if anyone volunteers to maintain it, because I suspect that
>> the
>> original maintainer is not involved actively any longer), or consider
>> deprecating it.
>
> I have to admit that I didn't consider that there could already be a TCL
> unit available. Therefore I did a full header translation for TCL 8.4
> (which
> was the current version at that time). Additionally I added an object
> oriented wrapper to ease the programming.
>
> Please see at https://github.com/hansiglaser/pas-tcl for the sources.
>
> I use this library (together with pas-readline) in several projects (e.g.
> "eztool" on Github), some of which are actively in development but not yet
> published. It currently works perfectly with TCL 8.5, but I didn't (yet)
> update the header translations.
>
> I'd be happy for any help improving the library or even inclusion in FPC!

Since you already use TCL, could you please check if the version included
with FPC is still useable at all with the currently available TCL version?
I guess that you'd be probably able to modify one of your test programs to
only use functions available in the older TCL version (or create another
simple test for that purpose if that would be easier)?

Depending on the result (and compatibility of the relevant licences), we
have to agree with other members of the FPC core team on the most sensible
approach. I noticed that there are some obvious differences in used types
(pointer versus PChar, minor differences in parameter or record member
names, etc.) between the two translations, but these might not impose a
major issue.


> PS: I've mentioned the TCL library in the fpc-pascal list some time ago:
> http://lists.freepascal.org/fpc-pascal/2012-September/035177.html

I see; I probably missed it then.

BTW, I noticed that you refer to file license.terms in multiple places of
your repository, but I couldn't find that file there.

Tomas