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Tclkit Building Made Trivial

KitCreator is a simple build system for creating a Tclkit. It was created to ease creation of Tclkits. If you just want to use Tcl on your platform, it is recommended that you use a pre-built Tclkit. See the "Tclkit Downloads" section on the Downloads page for a list of sources for pre-built Tclkits.

A Tclkit is, briefly, a single-file executable that contains Tcl (both the interpreter, and all the resources it requires to operate) and other Tcl-related packages (Tk, Incr Tcl, etc). A tclkit can be used to create a Starpack, which is the Tclkit plus the resources required for your Tcl-based application in a single file. This makes application delivery easy and consistent as it will be a single file that the user runs to use the application. Additionally, since a Tclkit is generic, any Tclkit from any platform can be used as the base for a Starpack. That is, from GNU/Linux you can take the Tclkit for AIX and add your application to produce a native executable for AIX.

KitCreator can create a library that provides the Tcl (and optionally Tk) API for a system. This is called KitDLL. The library has all of the support files embedded into it. The library's virtual filesystem can be extended by appending a zip file to it. It can also be extended by appending a zip file to the application itself.

KitCreator can be used to cross-compile a Tclkit, however you may need to have a working Tclkit for your native system first. KitCreator can be used to create this local boot-strap Tclkit.

There is an automated test suite that is performed nightly, the results can be found on the nightly build status page.

If you are looking for pre-built TclKits, please see the TclKits Download page.

Additional resources: