WxPython versus Tkinter.

[Mark Roseman]

 Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> Tk itself is purely a gui package -- abstract widgits, geometry placers 
> to make them visible, and an event system to make them active. But it 
> does have the baggage of needing tcl included. About a decade ago, some 
> people had the idea of removing the tcl dependency, but nothing seems to 
> have come of that. For some people, the tcl baggage is reason enough to 
> be rid of tk.


Thanks for raising this point.  While I don't want to exhaustively 
respond to this, I would like to raise a few important points.

1. The performance issues of having Tk use Tcl are negligible; the bulk 
of Tk (code-wise and time-wise) are spent in C.  Tcl itself is also very 
fast nowadays, using all the usual techniques that modern dynamic 
languages use.

2. Some people do have moral/purity objections to including Tcl, and 
while I understand where the sentiment comes from, I think there are few 
solid engineering reasons for this.

3. Removing Tcl from Tk makes keeping up with changes in Tk very 
difficult.  The Perl people found this out; Perl/Tk extracted Tcl, and 
as a result remained using a 10 year old version of Tk because upgrading 
would have been too painful.  The newer Perl binding (Tkx) is in fact a 
ridiculously thin binding over the Tcl API, and makes keeping up to date 
with the newest Tk changes trivial, often requiring no code changes in 
the Perl binding. 

If anyone does have questions, comments or concerns about Python 
including a Tcl interpreter to use Tk, I'd be happy to try to explain or 
address them.

Mark