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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Araujo, Alan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10399
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author Araujo, Alan
author_facet Araujo, Alan
contents I present Vanilla Object Orientation (VOO), a framework that composes classes from Tcl's native data structures -- lists and dictionaries -- rather than introducing additional framework infrastructure. VOO objects are plain Tcl lists with automatic memory management through copy-on-write semantics, eliminating the destructor burden inherent in TclOO and Itcl. Benchmarks on Tcl 8.6.13 and Tcl 9.0 show VOO achieves 7--18x faster object creation and 4--6x superior memory efficiency compared to TclOO. A companion C++ migration path (VOO C++) further improves field-access speed (setter 2.3--2.6x faster) and memory (6.8--9.8x lighter than TclOO), while preserving an identical Tcl call-site API. Cross-version analysis confirms that VOO's compositional design scales better than framework-based approaches as the interpreter evolves.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_10399
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Vanilla Object Orientation (VOO): A Value-Semantics Approach to Classes in Tcl
Araujo, Alan
Programming Languages
68N19
D.3.3
I present Vanilla Object Orientation (VOO), a framework that composes classes from Tcl's native data structures -- lists and dictionaries -- rather than introducing additional framework infrastructure. VOO objects are plain Tcl lists with automatic memory management through copy-on-write semantics, eliminating the destructor burden inherent in TclOO and Itcl. Benchmarks on Tcl 8.6.13 and Tcl 9.0 show VOO achieves 7--18x faster object creation and 4--6x superior memory efficiency compared to TclOO. A companion C++ migration path (VOO C++) further improves field-access speed (setter 2.3--2.6x faster) and memory (6.8--9.8x lighter than TclOO), while preserving an identical Tcl call-site API. Cross-version analysis confirms that VOO's compositional design scales better than framework-based approaches as the interpreter evolves.
title Vanilla Object Orientation (VOO): A Value-Semantics Approach to Classes in Tcl
topic Programming Languages
68N19
D.3.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10399