Child interpreters

For most applications, a single interpreter and subroutines are quite sufficient. However, if you are building a client-server system (for example) you may need to have several interpreters talking to different clients, and maintaining their state. You can do this with state variables, naming conventions, or swapping state to and from disk, but that gets messy.

The interp command creates new child interpreters within an existing interpreter. The child interpreters can have their own sets of variables, commands and open files, or they can be given access to items in the parent interpreter.

If the child is created with the -safe option, it will not be able to access the file system, or otherwise damage your system. This feature allows a script to evaluate code from an unknown (and untrusted) source.

The names of child interpreters are a hierarchical list. If interpreter foo is a child of interpreter bar, then it can be accessed from the toplevel interpreter as {bar foo}.

The primary interpreter (what you get when you type tclsh) is the empty list {}.

The interp command has several subcommands and options. A critical subset is:

interp create -safe name

Creates a new interpreter and returns the name. If the -safe option is used, the new interpreter will be unable to access certain dangerous system facilities.

interp delete name

Deletes the named child interpreter.

interp eval args

This is similar to the regular eval command, except that it evaluates the script in the child interpreter instead of the primary interpreter. The interp eval command concatenates the args into a string, and ships that line to the child interpreter to evaluate.

interp alias srcPath srcCmd targetPath targetCmd arg arg

The interp alias command allows a script to share procedures between child interpreters or between a child and the primary interpreter.

Note that slave interpreters have a separate state and namespace, but do not have separate event loops. These are not threads, and they will not execute independently. If one slave interpreter gets stopped by a blocking I/O request, for instance, no other interpreters will be processed until it has unblocked.

The example below shows two child interpreters being created under the primary interpreter {}. Each of these interpreters is given a variable name which contains the name of the interpreter.

Note that the alias command causes the procedure to be evaluated in the interpreter in which the procedure was defined, not the interpreter in which it was evaluated. If you need a procedure to exist within an interpreter, you must interp eval a proc command within that interpreter. If you want an interpreter to be able to call back to the primary interpreter (or other interpreter) you can use the interp alias command.

Example

set i1 [interp create firstChild]
set i2 [interp create secondChild]

puts "first child interp:  $i1"
puts "second child interp: $i2\n"

# Set a variable "name" in each child interp, and
#  create a procedure within each interp 
#  to return that value
foreach int [list $i1 $i2] {
    interp eval $int [list set name $int]
    interp eval $int {proc nameis {} {global name; return "nameis: $name";} }
}  

foreach int [list $i1 $i2] {
    interp eval $int "puts \"EVAL IN $int: name is \$name\""
    puts "Return from 'nameis' is: [interp eval $int nameis]"
}

#
# A short program to return the value of "name"
#
proc rtnName {} {
    global name
    return "rtnName is: $name"
}

#
# Alias that procedure to a proc in $i1
interp alias $i1 rtnName {} rtnName 

puts ""

# This is an error.  The alias causes the evaluation
#  to happen in the {} interpreter, where name is
#  not defined.
puts "firstChild reports [interp eval $i1 rtnName]"