iRule Ok!

Posted Sep 30, 2024 21:10 UTC (Mon) by hisdad (subscriber, #5375)
Parent article: Tcl/Tk 9.0 released

I use it frequently in small amounts. The iRule System for the BIG-IP product will run TCL fragments on data events.
Very useful and very fast. However I'm glad it was just small fragments as trying to write functions (procs) is opaque I never did figure upvalues out..

https://clouddocs.f5.com/api/irules/WhatIsAnIRule.html

IOS-too

Posted Sep 30, 2024 23:22 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I think Cisco IOS has some facility to run TCL as an embedded scripting language but I've never seen it used, I think most places just automate the CLI. We still use TCL as part of Expect for clogin2 (derived from RANCID a long time ago) but with very little ongoing maintenance as I don't know TCL all that well.

A long time ago at a different place we had some Perl/Tk utilities, before Python/GTK existed, which were very responsive, and it might be fun to go back for those who have the time, but all the engineering effort has gone into HTML/CSS/JS instead of Tk, even for local apps with Electron.

Now I was wondering who used scotty/Tkined but I just searched for it and apparently it's still maintained ... by FlightAware (?!)

Tk is weird but neat although the technical preference for embedded scripting languages is usually Lua or Python, not TCL, even though that's what it was designed for, IIUC.

iRule Ok!

Posted Sep 30, 2024 23:33 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Hit send too soon, the other place I remember TCL showing up was in the network processor on the BreakingPoint load simulation appliance (then Ixia, then someone else), so it's possible the F5 used the same kind of processor (maybe Cavium or similar), to simulate hundreds of thousands of devices all speaking HTTP or DHCP or whatever with full TCP sessions and whatnot, capable of saturating 10Gbit line-rate. They had a UI (in Adobe Flash to get a sense of how long ago this was) where you could customize the built-in programs and do some light scripting but I thought there was a way to load your own TCL programs if you have the technical expertise to develop them, but maybe I'm mis-remembering (I don't want to spend the rest of the evening looking up info on a dead appliance platform 8-) but I wonder if anyone else worked on this kind of stuff?