From Newsgroup: comp.lang.tcl


I've ported undroidwish -- AndroWish's batteries-included,
SDL2-rendered Tcl 8.6 / Tk 8.6 wish -- to iOS/iPadOS on arm64.
It's called iWish. It's the iOS sibling of Christian Werner's
AndroWish / undroidwish: the same SDL-based drawing path that runs
on Android and the desktop, now on Apple tablets.

Meant for iPad. It will launch on iPhone, but the native wish UI
(menus, canvas, standard Tk widgets) is desktop-sized, and a phone
is simply too small to use it comfortably. Think of iWish as a way
to run your Tk desktop app on a tablet.

Screenshot:

https://decentespresso.com/img/iwish_demo1.png

What's in it:

- A real Tcl 8.6 / Tk 8.6 interpreter under iOS/iPadOS. Tk renders
through an X11-on-SDL2 layer (SdlTkX) onto Metal -- native canvas
and widgets, no UIKit bridging.

- Batteries included: ~114 bundled packages, 64 of them native
arm64-apple-ios dylibs -- tkimg, TLS (LibreSSL), TclCurl, sqlite3,
itcl/itk, Thread, tDOM, Tktable, tktreectrl, zint, TkBLT, Tix,
VecTcl, and more.

- Bluetooth LE via CoreBluetooth (a ble-ios native shim), so Tcl
apps can talk to BLE peripherals directly.

- An iOS device bridge (borg) for platform features.

- A File > Demos menu with ready-to-run examples: TkBLT plotting,
a BLE debugger, iOS-bridge demos, and a paint tool.

Download and install:

- Prebuilt IPA (alpha): iWish.ipa on the releases page, currently
iWish 0.2-alpha:

https://github.com/johnbuckman/iwish/releases

- The IPA is UNSIGNED -- re-sign it with your own Apple Development
certificate, then install. A free Apple ID works but the app
expires after 7 days; a paid Apple Developer account ($99/year)
gives a 1-year signature. Easiest paths are Sideloadly or AltStore
(they re-sign as they install), or install straight from Xcode.

- Source and build recipes:

https://github.com/johnbuckman/iwish

- 32-bit / iOS 9 (original iPad mini, A5-A6 devices): separate
project, sideload-only, since Apple no longer accepts 32-bit apps
in the App Store:

https://github.com/johnbuckman/androwish-ios9

Status: it's 0.2-alpha and young, but the underlying runtime is the
same one shipping in the iOS build of the Decent Espresso machine app
-- a large real-world Tk application (thousands of lines, live graphs,
BLE hardware control). If it runs that, it will very likely run your
Tk app.

Bug reports and pull requests welcome via GitHub issues. iWish is
built entirely on Christian Werner's AndroWish / undroidwish
foundation -- thank you.

-- John Buckman
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