Mauricio is right; tclcruncher gave a bit of performance under TCL 7
(an optimization that became useless when the bytecode compiler came
in, nonwithstanding the raw power of current machines).
So it's true that we could have distributed the tclcrunched source
file (which is pretty ugly!) but at that point it made sense to
compile it in the tclsh (tcl2c creates a C string that gets emebedded
in the tclsh and is interpreted on launch).
That way, people would just grab the "binary" and be up and running.
Keep in mind that Cecilia was originally on IRIX, for a "customer
base" that used their workstations as "users", a very different crowd
from current linux users. Lots of machines did not even have a
compiler...
also keep in mind that none of us had a really working linux box at
the time :) Dave has been quite essential in testing and getting
Cecilia running on linux.
i think the reason for not releasing the source code was to get it
in good shape (you know, clean the kid a bit). time has passed and i
guess it's pretty clear we'll never give it another stab...
good luck reading that code!
Alex.
At 4:55 PM -0500 12/29/00, Dave Phillips wrote:
>Maurizio Umberto Puxeddu wrote:
>
> > Apart from hiding the sources, what should be the reason for compiling
> > Cecilia?
> > Speed improvements?
>
>I think that was true when Cecilia was first developed. I've been
>advised that the performance improvement now is just marginal on fast
>machines. Plus, Tcl is better now too.
>
> > ...I guess that tcl2c
> > is not a real "tcl to c" converter. It probably just generates a C
> > program that executes your script (Cecilia) in an embedded TCL
> > intepreter. So probably there will be no speed gain. The only gain in
> > this field comes from tclcruncher.
> >
> > Am I wrong?
>
>My impression was that it created a standalone C program for compiling,
>I don't know about an embedded Tcl interpreter. There are a few
>different tcl2c progs out there...
>
>Best regards,
>
>== Dave Phillips
>
> The Book Of Linux Music & Sound at http://www.nostarch.com/lms.htm
> The Linux Soundapps Site at http://sound.condorow.net
