In my own rather biased opinion, I'd probably go for Tcl. It's still much easier to create a GUI with Tcl than with Java, even with Swing. And my experience is that GUI performance with Tcl is still
much more responsive than with Java.
As for handling your libraries with Tcl, I'd strongly recommend checking out SWIG,
which can automatically generate the wrapper code needed to expose your library functions as Tcl commands.
Having said that, there's still something to be said for Java. Deployment of your application would probably be easier with Java, especially if you have no idea whether or not the target systems will have Java and/or Tcl already installed. I'd say it's more likely that Java is installed on an average machine than Tcl, and people are more accustomed to the idea of install a Java JRE. Although there are several deployment options for Tcl that don't rely on having Tcl installed already (see
all of these schemes will be more complicated with the issue of the binary libraries. Of course, that will also complicate deployment of a Java application as well. - Ken Jones, President
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