Compiled Runtime In Tcl

• This is version 3 of Critcl, with several new features, listed below. This version has changes to the public API which make it incompatible with packages using Critcl version 2.x, or earlier.

Building Critcl

• The toplevel directory contains a Tcl script build.tcl for building and installing Critcl in various forms. Here we describe only building and installation of the necessary packages, and the creation of critcl starkits. For more information run

  % ./build.tcl help

• Building and installing the package, and its support:

  % ./build.tcl install

  builds and installs the critcl package, and all supporting packages in the [info library] directory of the tclsh found in PATH and used to run build.tcl.

  Explicitly using a specific tclsh, like

  % /path/to/tclsh ./build.tcl install

  will install the packages in the [info library] directory of that shell.

  Explicitly using a specific installation directory, like

  % ./build.tcl install /path/to/chosen/package/directory/

  will install all the packages there.

• Building a starkit is don via

  % ./build.tcl starkit

  This places the resulting file critcl.kit in the current working directory.

  Explicitly using a specific installation path, like

  % ./build.tcl starkit /path/to/chosen/critcl.kit

  will put the generated starkit there.

Using Critcl

• It is expected that the system you wish to use critcl on has a working C compiler. Installation and setup of such a compiler is platform and vendor specific, and instructions for doing so are very much outside of the scope of this document. Please read the documentation, how-tos, etc. for your platform or vendor.

New Features

• Here we provide only a short list of the features. For more details see the 'Changes' sections in the reference manpages, or the files "doc/include/changes*.inc" which are the shared source of said sections.

• Declaration, export and import of C-APIs through stubs tables.

• Generation of source packages from critcl-based code containing a TEA-based buildsystem wrapped around the raw critcl.

• Declaration, initializaton and use of user-specified configuration options. An important use is the declaration and use of custom build configurations, like 'link a 3rd party library dynamically, statically, build it from copy of its sources, etc.', etc.

Documentation

• The source of the reference manpages for the main packages can be found in the sub-directory "doc/", with various (shared) text blocks under "doc/include/". They are written using doctools markup (See Tcllib's doctools packages). The files match the pattern "doc/*.man", and "doc/include/*.inc".

• The files matching the pattern "doc/include/*.dia" are diagram specifications using the dia markup language (See Tklib's diagram packages). The files matching the pattern "doc/include/*.png" are the diagrams saved as raster images in the PNG format.

  This was done with the dia application found in Tklib.

• The directory "embedded/" contains the reference manpages in nroff and HTML formats, derived from the doctools sources under "doc/".

  The script used to (re)generate these files is "tools/makedoc.sh". It requires the dtplite application found in Tcllib.

History

• 2011-08-18 : Move code to public repository on GitHub

  The Subversion repository at svn://svn.equi4.com/critcl is now obsolete.
  GitHub has the new official repository for Critcl.