{"id":50426474,"title":"Show HN: Native Tcl/Tk Wayland and Android Port","points":1,"user":"wusspuss","time":1794236019,"time_ago":"4 hours ago","type":"link","content":"

Native Wayland for Tk was proposed years ago as a hard GSoC project ( https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/GSoC+Idea%3A+Tk+Backend+for+t... ) - and let's be honest, it's very hard for humans. Turns out AI cracks it in a few hours.

Claude was given the freedom to make its choices from top to bottom, including stack and architecture. It came up with a thin X11 emulation layer, the same approach Tk's macOS and Windows ports already take - except this one is shared by Wayland and Android thanks to their similarity. The human in the loop merely tested and sanity-checked the outcome to her unexpected satisfaction. Tkabber (a large, long-lived XMPP client) runs on the Wayland port unaltered, and on Android with one small fix.

Unlike AndroWish (an SDL-based Tcl/Tk distribution for Android), this is a backend inside Tk itself, shared with the Wayland port: Cairo/HarfBuzz drawing, with touch and the on-screen keyboard handled in generic Tk through new commands and events.

If you want to experience an anachronism, you can try the APK of the Tk demo with an added multitouch example ( https://github.com/pounceandmiss/tk-wayland/releases/ ), and full-on Tkabber on Android ( https://github.com/pounceandmiss/tkabber-demo/releases/ ).","url":"https://github.com/pounceandmiss/tkabber-demo","domain":"github.com","comments":[],"comments_count":0}