ActiveState announced the release of ActiveTcl 8.5, in conjunction with the official release by the Tcl Core Team of version 8.5.0 of the Tcl dynamic language and the Tk GUI toolkit. Over four years in development, this release is a major advance over earlier versions.

Tcl is a very powerful but easy to learn dynamic programming language, suitable for a very wide range of uses, including web and desktop applications, networking, administration, testing and many more. ActiveTcl is the industry-standard Tcl distribution, available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX.

"We are are pleased to release a faster, smarter and more powerful version of ActiveTcl." says Jeff Hobbs, Senior Tcl Developer and Director of the Languages Business Division at ActiveState, "Developers will benefit from new core support for arbitrary-precision integers, a new theming engine and widgets, and numerous other changes to better integrate existing language features in more cohesive ways".

ActiveTcl 8.5 offers both improved performance and new programmer conveniences.

Already based on a high-performance byte-compiled runtime, ActiveTcl 8.5 now runs 10% faster than the previous version, due to bytecode optimizations, object caching and reduced memory usage. Developers will also benefit from richer time and date tools including year-2038 compliance, and a new and simpler module packaging standard. Numerous other changes better integrate existing language features in more cohesive ways.

ActiveTcl 8.5 can be downloaded free here http://www.ActiveState.com/Products/activetcl/.