High performance graphic display with Tcl/Tk

  • Authors:
  • Darren Spruce

  • Affiliations:
  • European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Grenoble, France

  • Venue:
  • TCLTK'96 Proceedings of the 4th conference on USENIX Tcl/Tk Workshop, 1996 - Volume 4
  • Year:
  • 1996

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Abstract

This paper describes how Tcl/Tk was used for the development of a high speed updating graph display. Tcl is not reputed for its performance and where real time graphics is required a purpose built 'C' program is necessary to cope with the speed. However Tcl/Tk along with the BLT graph widget extension provide a useful set of tools for GUI building and graph displays. This application shows how performance can be built in to an interpreted environment so that the developer can benefit from the high level of functionality offered by Tcl/Tk and BLT and at the same time display a spectrum of 16000 points updating every second. Although the application is designed to display data from a Multi Channel Analyser (MCA), the technique can easily be adapted to display other types of 2 column data.