Various ideas have been proposed and systems introduced in an attempt to
improve Tcl perfomance via some kind of '''script compilation'''.  This pages exists
to enumerate and organize those ideas.  For information about packaging,
obfuscating, and deploying scripts, possibly as stand-alone executables, see
[deployment]


** See Also **

   [deployment]:   

   [http://phaseit.net/claird/comp.lang.tcl/tcl_compilers.html%|%Cameron Laird's personal notes on Tcl compilers]:   

   [bytecode]:   

   [A Tcl Compiler Idea]:   

   [GE ICE Tcl compiler]:   A commercial Tcl compiler available for a number of Unix platforms.

   [JIT]:   

   [OttoCompiler]:   a Tcl compiler that may or may not be what it claims to be

   [Kt2c]:   translates Tcl bytecodes into C. * Note on June 08, 2004: [TPHNRAF]

   [Radical reform of the execution engine]:   A discussion and ongoing project to generate native code from Tcl bytecodes.

   [tcl2c]:   

   [Lightning]:   GNU lightning is a library that generates assembly language code at run-time

   [TJC compiler]:   A Tcl compiler for the [TclJava] project.

   [Tcl Static Prime]:   An experimental compiler for the Tcl language that produces [C] or [Java] code.



** Reading **

   [https://groups.google.com/d/topic/comp.lang.tcl/XW9_V6JeQc0/discussion%|%interpretated vs compiled] ,[comp.lang.tcl] ,2003-08-16:   


** Tcl Bytecode **

Since version 8.4, Tcl has featured the ability to automatically translate
scripts into [bytecode] where feasible, and, for the most part, script authors
don't have to do anything particularly special to take advantage of it.
[apply%|%Lambdas] and [proc%|%procedures] are automatically translated to
bytecode, and where feasible, so are arguments to [expr]-like commands such as
[if], [while], and [expr] itself.

The Tcl 8.x built in compilation phase into bytecodes does not provide hooks
for storing or loading later the bytecodes.  There is at least one other
standalone compiler which addresses this issue.


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