March 1st, 2019

Another Egg in the Coop: pstk

Got myself a new hobby: I’m now the maintainer of the pstk egg of Chicken Scheme. PS/Tk adds an interface to the Tk GUI toolkit to Scheme. Tk has gotten a lot of bad rep over the years, but since the major overhaul in version 8.5 it’s actually become a great option for building cross-platform GUI applications again. PS/Tk itself has a long history, dating back to scheme_wish which was developed by Sven Hartrumpf in 1997/98. The fact that the code still works without any major changes with the latest releases of Tcl/Tk and Chicken Scheme is pretty amazing, I think.

For now, I haven’t done any major changes, other than a few small tweaks to ensure that it will work with Chicken 5. I do see some room for improvement though. Namely some functions can be removed as they have become part of the R5RS standard, and ideally I would like to break up that large letrec block into smaller, more maintainable chunks. Also a few bits and pieces from newer Tk versions are still missing.