Groups | Search | Server Info | Login | Register

Groups > comp.lang.tcl > #55652

ANNOUNCE: TBCX v1.1 released

Show all headers | View raw

Hello everyone,

I am pleased to announce the release of TBCX v1.1.

TBCX is a C extension for Tcl 9.1+ that serializes compiled Tcl bytecode
(plus enough metadata to reconstruct procs, TclOO methods, and lambda
constructs) into a compact binary file — and later allows to load that
file into another interpreter for fast startup without re-parsing or
re-compiling the original source. There's also a disassembler for
human-readable inspection.

What's New in v1.1:

   Breaking: The on-disk format changed from 9 to 91. Artifacts from
   v1.0 are not loadable by v1.1 and vice versa.

   Instruction-level body detection — a two-phase bytecode scanner now
   finds and precompiles script bodies that v1.0 left as plain text.
   This covers bodies for eval, uplevel, try/on/trap/finally, catch,
   foreach, while, for, if, dict for/map/update/with, lmap, time,
   timerate, and self method. Uses an O(1) opcode dispatch table.

   startCommand stripping — debugging instructions (~15% of bytecode)
   are replaced with jump1 at save time, reducing execution overhead
   while preserving all offsets.

   Self methods — oo::define { self method ... } is now captured and
   precompiled (kind 4), preserving metaclass inheritance for subclasses.

   oo::objdefine — per-object method definitions are now supported.

   unexport preservation — method access flags survive the body-swap
   during class precompilation.

   Cross-interpreter support — new TBCX_LIT_BYTESRC literal bundles
   bytecode with source text, enabling graceful recompilation in child
   interpreters or after epoch bumps.

   Lambda shimmer recovery — a persistent per-interpreter ApplyShim
   re-installs precompiled lambdas if type shimmer evicts them.

   NRE-aware shims — ProcShim and OOShim now intercept both objProc2
   and nreProc2 dispatch paths for full compatibility with Tcl's
   non-recursive evaluation engine.

   Hardened deserialization — tightened wire-format limits (code: 1 GiB
   -> 64 MiB, literals: 64M -> 1M, strings: 16 MiB -> 4 MiB), plus
   new caps for locals, stack depth, procs, classes, and methods.
   All wire-derived allocations use Tcl_AttemptAlloc.

   Test suite — grew from 32 to 536 unit tests across 28 files, plus
   342 assertions in a comprehensive roundtrip test.

Compatibility:

This package supports only Tcl 9.1, and it's been tested with Tcl 9.1a2.
For previous versions you may want to use

-  https://github.com/tcltk-depot/tclcompiler
-  https://github.com/tcltk-depot/tbcload

Project Homepage:

     https://github.com/bagnongithub/tbcx

Documentation:

     https://bagnongithub.github.io/tbcx

License:

     MIT License

Feedback/Bug Reports:

Feedback is welcome on the issue tracker
https://github.com/bagnongithub/tbcx/issues

Back to comp.lang.tcl | Previous | Next | Find similar

Thread

ANNOUNCE: TBCX v1.1 released bagnon <miguel@bagnon.com> - 2026-04-12 15:51 +0200

csiph-web