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Tänzer – An industrial web server framework for Tcl

tanzer.io

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Re: Tänzer – An industrial web server framework for Tcl

#3

Post by networked »

freyfogle wrote: post #2

Does the name imply it's influenced by Perl's Dancer framework? http://perldancer.org

That's right. The developer has commented about it at http://wiki.tcl.tk/40701:

>xan 2014-10-12: It sure is named after Dancer! However, one of the big draws of tanzer is that it doesn't expect a request handler to read the entire request nor response in one single go, which should hopefully allow for much better performing web applications without standing in one's way much.

Re: Tänzer – An industrial web server framework for Tcl

#5

Post by davidw »

darka wrote: post #4

How prevalent is Tcl usage in the real world? You don't hear much about it, are there any new startups adopting it? Or is it only used in legacy projects at large companies?

It's definitely not the 'in' thing these days, but it's a very solid, robust bit of code that still makes for a nice language for creating certain kinds of systems.

Re: Tänzer – An industrial web server framework for Tcl

#6

Post by lmm »

darka wrote: post #4

How prevalent is Tcl usage in the real world? You don't hear much about it, are there any new startups adopting it? Or is it only used in legacy projects at large companies?

I know a couple of startuppy companies that are still using it, but it certainly feels like a language in decline. There's a lot that's elegant about it, but the syntax is awkward in practice, and compared to e.g. Python there are fewer libraries available and no really compelling advantage, IMO.

It's a language that deserves better than it got - it should've become the standard for *nix config files (thanks RMS for the mess we have now). It should've been the language Sun pushed to run everywhere (it even supported java-style applets in web pages, without the slow vm startup). It should've filled the Lua niche (to a certain extent it did) as an embeddable scripting language. It should've filled the perl niche - it had good support for invoking external executables in a shell-scripting role, and could even be used as a login shell; it had good regex support, and was a first-class programming language that could be used for web backends. Heck, it even did reactive I/O in the very early days (IIRC there was a fantastic server product that was caught up in the demise of Netscape or AOL or some such) - it should've been Node too. But it always felt a bit unloved at Sun, especially post-Java (and to be fair, who can blame them when Java was that popular?), and it somehow never seemed to reach critical mass.

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