[TCLCORE] Tcl/Tk 8.7a3 RELEASED

[Porter, D. (Fed) <don...@ni...>]

Tcl/Tk 8.7a3 Release Announcement

November 25, 2019


The Tcl Core Team is pleased to announce the 8.7a3 releases of the Tcl

dynamic language and the Tk toolkit.  This is the second alpha release

of Tcl/Tk 8.7.  More details can be found below.  We would like to

express our gratitude to all those who submit bug reports and patches.

This information is invaluable in enabling us to identify and eliminate

problems in the core.


Where to get the new releases:

------------------------------


Tcl/Tk 8.7a3 sources are freely available as open source from the

Tcl Developer Xchange web site at:


        http://www.tcl-lang.org/software/tcltk/8.7.html


This web page also contains additional information about the releases,

including new features and notes about installing and compiling the

releases.  Sources are always available from the Tcl SourceForge

project's file distribution area:


        http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcl/files/


This distribution is source code only.  We keep links to some third

parties offering pre-built binaries for various systems here:


http://www.tcl-lang.org/software/tcltk/bindist.html


For additional information:

---------------------------


Please visit the Tcl Developer Xchange web site:


        http://www.tcl-lang.org/


This site contains a variety of information about Tcl/Tk in general, the

core Tcl and Tk distributions, Tcl development tools, and much more.


Summary of Changes since Tcl/Tk 8.6.10 and 8.7a1:

-------------------------------------------------


These are alpha releases of 8.7.  The alpha designation means that

they are in a period of feature addition.  All relevant bug fixes (and

some more) up to and including changes in 8.6.10 are included in 8.7a3.

The following list focuses on new features added to 8.7a3 since 8.7a1. The

changes file at the root of the source tree contains a more complete

list.  The Timelines of all changes are online.


https://core.tcl-lang.org/tcl/

https://core.tcl-lang.org/tk/


This release is a development release, and should only be considered for

deployment use after considerable testing.


New Commands and Features

   * [TIP 430] zipfs and embedded script library


   * [TIP 389] Unicode beyond BMP


   * [TIP 547] New encodings utf-16, ucs-2


   * [TIP 500] TclOO Private Methods and Variables


   * [TIP 524] TclOO custom dialects


   * [TIP 516] More OO slot operations


   * [TIP 519] inline export/unexport option for [oo::define]


   * [TIP 478] Many new features in TclOO


   * [TIP 164] [$canvas rotate]


   * [TIP 489] [$canvas image]


   * [TIP 507,545] New photo image format 'svg'


   * [TIP 462] [::tcl::process]


   * [TIP 421] [array for]


   * [TIP 508] [array default]


   * [TIP 476] Scan/Printf consistency


   * [TIP 351] [lsearch] striding


   * [TIP 523] [lpop]


   * [TIP 367] [lremove]


   * [TIP 501] [string is dict]


   * [TIP 504] [string insert]


   * [TIP 342] [dict getwithdefault]


   * [TIP 262] New frame options -backgroundimage, -tile


   * [TIP 496] New entry options -placeholder*


   * [TIP 517] New menu option -activerelief


   * [TIP 415] New [$canvas create arc] option -height


   * [TIP 518] New event <<NoManagedChild>>


   * [TIP 426] [info cmdtype]


   * [TIP 160] terminal and serial channel controls


   * [TIP 312] more types for Tcl_LinkVar


   * [TIP 431] [file tempdir]


   * [TIP 383] [coroinject], [coroprobe]


   * [TIP 461] string compare operators for [expr]


   * [TIP 521] floating point classification functions for [expr]


   * [TIP 544] Tcl_GetIntForIndex()


   * [TIP 414] Tcl_InitSubsystems()


   * [TIP 548] wchar_t conversion functions


   * [TIP 490] msgcat: add oo support


   * [TIP 499] msgcat: custom locale preference list


   * [TIP 406] http: support for cookies


Deprecations/Migration aids

   * [TIP 161] $menu -tearoff default changed to false


   * [TIP 487] Terminate support for pre-XP Windows


   * [TIP 491] Phase out --disable-threads support


   * [TIP 493] Cease Distribution of http 1.0


   * [TIP 345] eliminate the encoding 'identity'


   * [TIP 483] Record more configuration items


   * [TIP 482] Record configured directory for demos


   * [TIP 512] No stub for Tcl_SetExitProc()


   * [TIP 512] Deprecate stub for Tk_MainEx()


   * [TIP 484] internal rep for native ints are all 64-bit


   * [TIP 514] native integers are 64-bit


   * [TIP 503] End CONST84 support for Tcl 8.3


   * [TIPs 330,336] tighten access to Interp fields


   * [TIP 445] Tcl_ObjType utilities


   * [TIP 506] Tcl_(Incr|Decr)RefCount macros -> functions


   * [TIP 528] Deprecate Tk_Offset()


   * Replace TclOffset() with offsetof()


   * [TIP 422] Mark all Tcl_*VA() routines deprecated.


   * [TIP 485] Removal of many deprecated features


   * Ended use of the obsolete values.h header


Fix crashes or hangs in ...

   * ...crash deleting class mixed into instance, oo-11.6

   * ...complex ensemble delete, namespace-7.8

   * ...[join $l $l], join-4.1

   * ...[try], cmdMZ-try-1.0

   * ...multi-arg traced [lappend], execute-12.[1-4]


Bug/Regression Repair

   * [TIP 515] level value reform


   * [TIP 502] index value reform


   * [TIP 477] Reform of nmake build


   * [TIP 425] Windows panic callback use of UTF-8


   * [TIP 509] Cross platform reentrant mutex


   * [string first] on ASCII stored as Unicode


   * [lsort] ordering of U+0000


   * [string cat] of bytearrays


   * [binary format w] from bignum


--

Tcl Core Team and Maintainers

Don Porter, Tcl Core Release Manager