GUI toolkit(s) status

[Paul Rubin]

Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> writes:
> Tcl/Tk currently use UCS-2, which only handles BMP chars. Alternatives
> to support astral chars: [other encodings]

I haven't looked into the issue but from Christian's post it sounded
like the BMP limitation was deeper inside Tcl/TK and would take more
serious work to fix.  How many people really care?

> UTF-32 ... memory hit.  However, most tk apps are not text heavy ...
> UFT-8: Makes indexing O(n).

Given that most tk apps aren't text heavy, UTF-8 seems fine: when has
the O(n) indexing been found to be a real problem in practice?

>> Apple is a moving target, they pulled the rug from under Tk's feet
>> twice over the past 10 years. 

Hmm interesting.  Then there's also lots of new targets like mobile
phones which Tk hasn't been ported to Afaik.

> A possible solution for Tk is to replace the non-C Tcl parts of TK
> with Python (or the CPython API functions as needed for speed).  I
> have no idea how horrendous a project creating Py/Tk would be.

Tcl itself is reasonably small and portable, the problem is the bindings
(C code) to all the different window systems Tk supports.