[tex-live] Tlmgr closing takes fairly long

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2016-05-30 at 23:56:27 +0200, Zdenek Wagner wrote:

 > 2016-05-30 23:38 GMT+02:00 Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de>:
 >     BTW, Tcl/Tk is not slow because it's a platform independent
 >     programming environment, it's slow because Tcl is an
 >     interpreted language.  Most other scripting languages
 >     pre-compile the code before it's executed.  This makes a very
 >     big difference.
 > 
 > It is even worse, Tcl lacks numeric variables. If you want to
 > evaluate 3 + 2, first the string "3" is converted internally to a
 > number, then the string "2" is converted internally to a number,
 > the expression is evaluated to number 5 which is convertečd to
 > string "5" and the string is stored.

Well, I think that we can assume that nobody uses Tcl in order to do
arithmetic.  In the few cases where arithmetic is needed the overhead
is certainly acceptable.

Other programming languages convert strings to numbers and vice versa
on-the-fly too,

  $ perl -e 'print (1+"2");'
  3

but in Tcl it's more expensive because the code isn't compiled in
advance.

 >     I don't know anything about Java, but I've been told that current
 >     implementations are quite fast.
 > 
 > Yes, it is fast but the GNU Java for Linux lacks GUI, Java for
 > other platforms is not freely redistributable, users will have to
 > download and install it themselves. It need not be trivial. A few
 > month ago I found that a Java app working fine on my Linux did not
 > work on a Windows computer and the error message was not
 > useful. The reason was that the app required standard classes that
 > are not distributed with JRE but JDK is required. It can easily be
 > figured out by a Java expert but not by normal users, they will
 > just report that it does not work.

Thanks for the explanations.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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