Image: github.com · Tkabber starting on Android
Tcl/Tk ported to native Wayland and Android
Given a free hand, Claude built a thin X11 emulation layer shared by Wayland and Android, a long-proposed and difficult GSoC idea, in a few hours. It is demonstrated with the Tkabber client.
Credits
- Repository account pounceandmiss Source ↗
- HN submitter wusspuss Source ↗
Earliest dated source:
The full story
A native Wayland backend for Tk, the GUI toolkit used by Tcl, was proposed years ago as a hard Google Summer of Code project. Claude was given free rein over the stack and architecture and produced one in a few hours: a thin X11 emulation layer, like Tk's macOS and Windows ports, shared by Wayland and Android. It draws with Cairo and HarfBuzz and handles touch and the on-screen keyboard through new commands and events.
The demonstration is Tkabber, a large XMPP client written in Tcl/Tk over two decades, which runs unchanged on Wayland and as a native Android app with one small fix to where it looks for CA certificates. Unlike AndroWish, this is a backend inside Tk itself. The human in the loop tested and checked the result.
An APK is available for 64-bit ARM phones on Android 11 or later, signed with a debug key.
How it was done
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Sources
From the maker's own write-up or code. We summarise what they report; we haven't tested it ourselves.
- Hacker News: Show HN: Native Tcl/Tk Wayland and Android PortRepository account: pounceandmiss
The Tkabber-on-Android demonstration repository.
- Hacker News discussion (1 points)HN submitter: wusspussPosted
The Show HN post describing the port.