My beloved Pure Data (Pd) used Tcl/Tk as it's GUI engine. Whenever I hack on the Pd-GUI, I wonder which Tcl/Tk compatibility I need to take care of.

Newer versions of Tcl/Tk ship more features, which I often would like to use. OTOH, we want to support the widest possible range of installation targets, even if they are horribly outdated. (This mostly boils down to OSX [sic!] running on i386 or even PowerPC CPUs). While (I think that) the Pd-core itself can still be compiled for such old platforms, Tcl/Tk (esp, the Tk part) sometimes require new OS features. E.g. Tcl/Tk-9.x requires at least OSX 10.10 (Yosemite), which only supports amd64 (the last version of support i386 was OSX 10.7 Lion). The last version to support i386 on OSX was probably Tcl/Tk-8.5. And afaict, the last Tcl/Tk version to support a PowerPC version of OSX was Tcl/Tk-8.4.

Of course there are probably very few OSX/i386 or even OSX/PowerPC installations still running out there, so the question is now much I should invest time to support very old versions of Tcl/Tk (if at all).

Anyhow, in order to get a picture on the actual Tcl/Tk versions used by Pd, I've gathered some statistics, by downloading all available packages from Miller S.Puckette's Pd site and analyzing them for the embedded Tcl/Tk-interpreter.

The tables obviously reflect the state at the time of writing (2025-01-21).

Tcl/Tk versions shipped with official Pd downloads

Latest versions

Interestingly, the last OSX/i386 package contains a Tcl/Tk compiled (only) for amd64...

All versions

notes

Miller has not distributed Linux binaries since Pd-0.33, as on this platform you are expected to use the Tcl/Tk that comes with your distribution.

For older linux binary packages, the Tcl/Tk version can usually be inferred by checking against which libtk the binary was linked. Unfortunately a couple of binaries were linked against an unversioned libtk.so, in which case I've put in the pseudo-version ???.

There are some packages with arm binaries (targeting Raspberry Pi and Udoo), but they are from the Pd>0.42 era, that no longer dylinks against libtk (instead an external wish process is launched). In this case I've put in the pseudo-version none.

Pure Source-code downloads are missing from the table, as they do not ship with a Tcl/Tk version.

pre-built Tcl/Tk binaries shipped with Pd sources

The Pd sources contain prebuilt Tcl/Tk for Windows and macOS (to ease building packages)

Interestingly, none of these prebuilds are actually used in the official Pd binary packages. For the recent macOS packages this is my fault, as these packages are built using the iem's CI system and we provide our own prebuilt packages (mostly to get a universal binary that has native arm64 support).

I didn't know though, that the Windows binaries included a Tcl/Tk cross-compiled locally by Miller.