Chapter 3. Tcl Standalone Binaries

How many times have you installed the application you need and found out that, as a side effect, it created a lot of files under different locations? The beginnings are usually promising—you download a single-file executable installer and start it, only to see that it extracts its contents to the location that the file was ran from. And have you ever tried to change the location of the already installed software? If you are looking for guaranteed troubles, go ahead. Then, you decide that you need to remove it, only to find out that even after following the recommended way of uninstalling it, some files and other data—such as application data, registry entries, file associations—remain on the system.

Why is there such a lack of flexibility? Why are there a lot of self-executable installers, but not ready-to-use applications? Is it really so hard to create a portable, one-file application? Have you ever wondered how such binaries are being developed and what...