Re: Is it wise to use dtcl with something bigger?

["David N. Welton" <da...@apache.org>]

Wojciech Kocjan <zo...@nowiny.net> writes:

> Currently I've been involved (I didn't want to but that's another
> story :) in a portal engine development.

> As the topic is quite new it is possible to use whatever technology
> to do it. Currently the best idea is to write it all in C, but I've
> been wondering if it could be possible to use c+dtcl combination.

Tcl + C is a time-tested solution that works quite well for a variety
of things.  I think mod_dtcl is actually a good example of the power
of Tcl's C API.

> The core could be written in C, then there would be procs created
> using Tcl_CreateCommand() as an interface to tcl...

Yep...

> There are two most significant things to consider:

> 1. how stable is dtcl? I'm using 0.8.12 (a bit modified) for my
> development and it seems stable enough, but I haven't tested in on
> thousands hits a day... has anybody tested it in such conditions?

tcl.apache.org gets about 2000 hits a day, now, and has been running
unattended in my month of absence.

> 2. how fast is dtcl in comparison to cgi written in c?

Depends on a lot of factors....  CGI's have to fork new processes, so
dtcl is conceivably faster.  Depends on how much processing the C code
does.

You might write it as a CGI first, and then when the bugs are ironed
out, create a Tcl wrapper.

Good luck,
-- 
David N. Welton
     Personal:           http://www.efn.org/~davidw/  
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