For the main documentation of Tclkit, look elsewhere:
- Tcl/Tk - the scripting language
- IncrTcl - the OO extension built into Tclkit
- Metakit - the database built into Tclkit
- TclVFS - the Virtual File System extension
The reason is that Tclkit is mostly a combination of the above independent packages.
There are a number of differences with "plain" Tcl/Tk:
- Tclkit does not look for packages outside itself (auto_path)
- Tclkit comes with only a few encodings built-in (for a fix, look here):
ascii - cp1252 - iso8859-1 - iso8859-2 - macRoman (≥ 8.4.6: iso-8859-15) - All the runtimes files come from inside it, not from the file system
- Don't expect exec and popen to work on files in VFS
- Do expect "load", i.e. shared libraries to work (they are copied to disk)
- Tclkit includes "zlib" and "rechan" (like memchan) extensions coded in C
- Tclkit includes the mk4vfs and zipvfs drivers, but not the rest of TclVFS
For further information about Tclkit, see some other pages on this site (What's in Tclkit, Tclkit release policy, Building Tclkit) and pages on the Tclers' Wiki (Tclkit, Differences between Tclkit and Tcl, and here).
An excellent paper describing what it's all about, is Steve Landers' "Beyond Tclkit - Starkits, Starpacks, and other *stuff", presented at the 2002 Tcl/Tk conference.
Jim DeVona explains how to wrap a Starpack for Mac OS X, with details on how to get a clickable app with a proper icon showing in the Finder.
David Zolli has written very nice set of introduction pages about Tclkit, Starkits, and Starpacks, in French.
See also the introduction page on how to get started with Starkits and Tclkit.
Building from source
See the old wiki page here, and follow the links for more details.