From Newsgroup: comp.lang.tcl

Hi all:

A note first: in the last few months my Claude account (a Pro subscription, not the free tier) has gained the ability to build and run code in its own Linux sandbox. Before that, Claude could only hand me code and I had to do all the testing on my own machine. I don't know whether this is just my account or a general rollout.

This experiment started as a side effect of a tool Claude and I wrote to scan every proc in every package of a Magicsplat install, looking for bytecode problems. I extended it to count which commands are called through the command table (invokeStk) instead of being compiled inline. Most of what came up does real work per call (format, regsub, lsort, ...), so call overhead is a small part of the cost. The one cheap command that stood out was [lrange] with a non-literal index: [lrange $l 1 3] already compiles to listRangeImm, but [lrange $l $i $j] and [lrange $l 1 end-$n] fall back to a full command call.

I asked Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant), working in its sandbox with access to the GitHub mirror of the Tcl source, to add a new listRange instruction that always takes exactly three values from the stack: the list and both indices. It took about 20 minutes to get a complete patch with tests, after many build and test runs in the sandbox, including AddressSanitizer, Tcl's memory-debug build and the TCL_COMPILE_DEBUG build. I copied the changed files into my own tree, built, and ran the tests and a benchmark on two of my machines. Claude ran the same benchmark in its sandbox, which is the third column below.

Base: Tcl main, commit 78dedf7 (2026-10-05, GitHub mirror).

What changed (66 lines of C added, 16 removed; 161 lines of tests added):

generic/tclCompile.h +1 new opcode INST_LIST_RANGE
generic/tclCompile.c +7 instruction table entry
generic/tclExecute.c +34 the instruction
generic/tclCompCmdsGR.c +23 -16 compile non-literal indices to it
generic/tclAssembly.c +1 tcl::unsupported::assemble can use it
tests/lrange.test +85 lrange-6.1 .. 6.14
tests/compile.test +38 compile-22.1 .. 22.5
tests/assemble.test +38 assemble-7.47 .. 7.50

The instruction does what Tcl_LrangeObjCmd does, in the same order, so error messages and error precedence are the same as for the command. A test compares the compiled form against the command for 6 lists and 20 index forms each way, with no differences.

Tests: the full suite gives 509,285 tests (23 more than before), the same 8 failures before and after (httpProxy.test, which needs network access). disassemble and getbytecode show the new instruction.

Timing (ns per call, 10-element list, best of 7, before -> after):

machine 1 machine 2 Claude's sandbox
lrange $l $i $j 193 -> 126 117 -> 72 152 -> 98
lrange $l $i end 232 -> 165 130 -> 93 172 -> 123
lrange $l 1 end-$n 368 -> 291 200 -> 161 270 -> 212
lrange $l 1 3 (literal) 38 -> 39 24 -> 23 32 -> 34

The sandbox is a small shared VM, so its numbers are noisier than mine. The literal case compiles to identical bytecode in both builds, and its difference changes direction between machines, so I take it to be build-layout noise. The end-$n gain is smaller because the string "end-N" is still built and parsed on every call.

Limits: Linux only. I have not built it on Windows or macOS, so MSVC has not seen it. I have not tried an integer fast path for end-$n.

I am posting this as a data point more than as a proposal. If anyone on the core team thinks it is worth a ticket, I will file one with the patch. The patch, the test results and the benchmark script are here: https://github.com/rocketship88/lrange-inline .

On a side note, I have also found the same assistant good at drafting documentation for my own projects, especially when using the AI to build the projects. It needs a human to check the facts, but it makes a decent first draft. The Readme at github was also written by Claude.

Eric

--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.lang.tcl

Certainly worth pursuing I think. My knowledge of the Tcl byte code is
mostly based on cargo culting (blush) so creating a branch in the Tcl repository so more knowledgeable folks can take a look is worthwhile.
I'm not sure everyone reads c.l.t.

As an aside, I'm a bit surprised that this was not already compiled. The string range command is very similar to lrange and afaict that compiles
in much the same fashion as your patch for lrange with support for
non-literal arguments (which leads me to wonder if Claude might have
used it as the basis for what it produced). Not sure why lrange was not implemented the same way.

On a different topic, I wonder if you could ask Claude to optimize
invokeStk* bytecode implementation. I wonder if it is something that
needs to be inherently slower because the additional work involved or if
there is scope there for improvement.

/Ashok

On 10/7/2026 6:49 AM, et99 wrote:

Hi all:

A note first: in the last few months my Claude account (a Pro
subscription, not the free tier) has gained the ability to build and run code in its own Linux sandbox. Before that, Claude could only hand me
code and I had to do all the testing on my own machine. I don't know
whether this is just my account or a general rollout.

This experiment started as a side effect of a tool Claude and I wrote to scan every proc in every package of a Magicsplat install, looking for bytecode problems. I extended it to count which commands are called
through the command table (invokeStk) instead of being compiled inline.
Most of what came up does real work per call (format, regsub,
lsort, ...), so call overhead is a small part of the cost. The one cheap command that stood out was [lrange] with a non-literal index: [lrange $l
1 3] already compiles to listRangeImm, but [lrange $l $i $j] and [lrange
$l 1 end-$n] fall back to a full command call.

I asked Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant), working in its sandbox with access to the GitHub mirror of the Tcl source, to add a new listRange instruction that always takes exactly three values from the stack: the
list and both indices. It took about 20 minutes to get a complete patch
with tests, after many build and test runs in the sandbox, including AddressSanitizer, Tcl's memory-debug build and the TCL_COMPILE_DEBUG
build. I copied the changed files into my own tree, built, and ran the
tests and a benchmark on two of my machines. Claude ran the same
benchmark in its sandbox, which is the third column below.

Base: Tcl main, commit 78dedf7 (2026-10-05, GitHub mirror).

What changed (66 lines of C added, 16 removed; 161 lines of tests added):

  generic/tclCompile.h       +1         new opcode INST_LIST_RANGE
  generic/tclCompile.c       +7         instruction table entry
  generic/tclExecute.c       +34        the instruction
  generic/tclCompCmdsGR.c    +23 -16   compile non-literal indices to it
  generic/tclAssembly.c      +1         tcl::unsupported::assemble can
use it
  tests/lrange.test          +85        lrange-6.1 .. 6.14
  tests/compile.test         +38        compile-22.1 .. 22.5
  tests/assemble.test        +38        assemble-7.47 .. 7.50

The instruction does what Tcl_LrangeObjCmd does, in the same order, so
error messages and error precedence are the same as for the command. A
test compares the compiled form against the command for 6 lists and 20
index forms each way, with no differences.

Tests: the full suite gives 509,285 tests (23 more than before), the
same 8 failures before and after (httpProxy.test, which needs network access). disassemble and getbytecode show the new instruction.

Timing (ns per call, 10-element list, best of 7, before -> after):

                          machine 1    machine 2   Claude's sandbox
  lrange $l $i $j         193 -> 126   117 -> 72   152 -> 98
  lrange $l $i end        232 -> 165   130 -> 93   172 -> 123
  lrange $l 1 end-$n      368 -> 291   200 -> 161  270 -> 212
  lrange $l 1 3 (literal)  38 -> 39     24 -> 23    32 -> 34

The sandbox is a small shared VM, so its numbers are noisier than mine.
The literal case compiles to identical bytecode in both builds, and its difference changes direction between machines, so I take it to be build- layout noise. The end-$n gain is smaller because the string "end-N" is
still built and parsed on every call.

Limits: Linux only. I have not built it on Windows or macOS, so MSVC has
not seen it. I have not tried an integer fast path for end-$n.

I am posting this as a data point more than as a proposal. If anyone on
the core team thinks it is worth a ticket, I will file one with the
patch. The patch, the test results and the benchmark script are here: https://github.com/rocketship88/lrange-inline .

On a side note, I have also found the same assistant good at drafting documentation for my own projects, especially when using the AI to build
the projects. It needs a human to check the facts, but it makes a decent first draft. The Readme at github was also written by Claude.

Eric

--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.lang.tcl


Ashok,

Thanks for the encouragement. I've created an account on
core.tcl-lang.org (username: rocketship88) and have the change
committed locally on a Fossil branch called lrange-inline, based on
trunk check-in a675fa55 (2026-10-05). I can't push it yet because I
don't have write permission.

Could someone grant me rights to push it, or tell me who to ask? Or, if
you'd rather not, a diff made by Fossil (trunk vs. the branch) is here:

https://github.com/rocketship88/lrange-inline/blob/main/lrange.diff

It touches 8 files under generic/ and tests/. The rest of the experiment (README, benchmark script, the base files and the changed ones as
side-by-side commits) is at:

https://github.com/rocketship88/lrange-inline

As in my first post, the code and tests were written by Claude and I
reviewed, built and tested them locally. The tests pass on my builds.


Claude writes:

Ashok asked whether I looked at [string range]. I did, but only after he
asked, so it had no part in how I wrote the code. Having read it now, the two are very similar: both have an immediate form for literal indices and a three-value form for the rest.

As for why [lrange] was never done that way, a comment above TclCompileLrangeCmd says "We only bother because we needed the opcode anyway for lassign." So listRangeImm was added for lassign, and compiling [lrange] with literal indices came along as a side benefit. The non-literal case
doesn't seem to have been considered.

As for optimizing invokeStk, I haven't tried. It is a much bigger and riskier change than this one, because that path leaves the bytecode loop through TclNREvalObjv. We measured about 44 ns of call overhead on the faster of our machines. If the core team is interested, I'd start by profiling that path
with callgrind, with no code change, and see where the time goes.




-Eric


On 10/6/2026 8:23 PM, Ashok wrote:

Certainly worth pursuing I think. My knowledge of the Tcl byte code is mostly based on cargo culting (blush) so creating a branch in the Tcl repository so more knowledgeable folks can take a look is worthwhile. I'm not sure everyone reads c.l.t.

As an aside, I'm a bit surprised that this was not already compiled. The string range command is very similar to lrange and afaict that compiles in much the same fashion as your patch for lrange with support for non-literal arguments (which leads me to wonder if Claude might have used it as the basis for what it produced). Not sure why lrange was not implemented the same way.

On a different topic, I wonder if you could ask Claude to optimize invokeStk* bytecode implementation. I wonder if it is something that needs to be inherently slower because the additional work involved or if there is scope there for improvement.

/Ashok

On 10/7/2026 6:49 AM, et99 wrote:

Hi all:

A note first: in the last few months my Claude account (a Pro subscription, not the free tier) has gained the ability to build and run code in its own Linux sandbox. Before that, Claude could only hand me code and I had to do all the testing on my own machine. I don't know whether this is just my account or a general rollout.

This experiment started as a side effect of a tool Claude and I wrote to scan every proc in every package of a Magicsplat install, looking for bytecode problems. I extended it to count which commands are called through the command table (invokeStk) instead of being compiled inline. Most of what came up does real work per call (format, regsub, lsort, ...), so call overhead is a small part of the cost. The one cheap command that stood out was [lrange] with a non-literal index: [lrange $l 1 3] already compiles to listRangeImm, but [lrange $l $i $j] and [lrange $l 1 end-$n] fall back to a full command call.

I asked Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant), working in its sandbox with access to the GitHub mirror of the Tcl source, to add a new listRange instruction that always takes exactly three values from the stack: the list and both indices. It took about 20 minutes to get a complete patch with tests, after many build and test runs in the sandbox, including AddressSanitizer, Tcl's memory-debug build and the TCL_COMPILE_DEBUG build. I copied the changed files into my own tree, built, and ran the tests and a benchmark on two of my machines. Claude ran the same benchmark in its sandbox, which is the third column below.

Base: Tcl main, commit 78dedf7 (2026-10-05, GitHub mirror).

What changed (66 lines of C added, 16 removed; 161 lines of tests added):

   generic/tclCompile.h       +1         new opcode INST_LIST_RANGE
   generic/tclCompile.c       +7         instruction table entry
   generic/tclExecute.c       +34        the instruction
   generic/tclCompCmdsGR.c    +23 -16   compile non-literal indices to it
   generic/tclAssembly.c      +1         tcl::unsupported::assemble can use it
   tests/lrange.test          +85        lrange-6.1 .. 6.14
   tests/compile.test         +38        compile-22.1 .. 22.5
   tests/assemble.test        +38        assemble-7.47 .. 7.50

The instruction does what Tcl_LrangeObjCmd does, in the same order, so error messages and error precedence are the same as for the command. A test compares the compiled form against the command for 6 lists and 20 index forms each way, with no differences.

Tests: the full suite gives 509,285 tests (23 more than before), the same 8 failures before and after (httpProxy.test, which needs network access). disassemble and getbytecode show the new instruction.

Timing (ns per call, 10-element list, best of 7, before -> after):

                           machine 1    machine 2   Claude's sandbox
   lrange $l $i $j         193 -> 126   117 -> 72   152 -> 98 >>    lrange $l $i end        232 -> 165   130 -> 93   172 -> 123 >>    lrange $l 1 end-$n      368 -> 291   200 -> 161  270 -> 212
   lrange $l 1 3 (literal)  38 -> 39     24 -> 23    32 -> 34

The sandbox is a small shared VM, so its numbers are noisier than mine. The literal case compiles to identical bytecode in both builds, and its difference changes direction between machines, so I take it to be build- layout noise. The end-$n gain is smaller because the string "end-N" is still built and parsed on every call.

Limits: Linux only. I have not built it on Windows or macOS, so MSVC has not seen it. I have not tried an integer fast path for end-$n.

I am posting this as a data point more than as a proposal. If anyone on the core team thinks it is worth a ticket, I will file one with the patch. The patch, the test results and the benchmark script are here: https://github.com/rocketship88/lrange-inline .

On a side note, I have also found the same assistant good at drafting documentation for my own projects, especially when using the AI to build the projects. It needs a human to check the facts, but it makes a decent first draft. The Readme at github was also written by Claude.

Eric

--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.lang.tcl

You should have access now. Please retry.


On 10/7/2026 12:37 PM, et99 wrote:

Ashok,

Thanks for the encouragement. I've created an account on
core.tcl-lang.org (username: rocketship88) and have the change
committed locally on a Fossil branch called lrange-inline, based on
trunk check-in a675fa55 (2026-10-05). I can't push it yet because I
don't have write permission.

Could someone grant me rights to push it, or tell me who to ask? Or, if
you'd rather not, a diff made by Fossil (trunk vs. the branch) is here:

    https://github.com/rocketship88/lrange-inline/blob/main/lrange.diff

It touches 8 files under generic/ and tests/. The rest of the experiment (README, benchmark script, the base files and the changed ones as side-by-side commits) is at:

    https://github.com/rocketship88/lrange-inline

As in my first post, the code and tests were written by Claude and I reviewed, built and tested them locally. The tests pass on my builds.

Claude writes:

Ashok asked whether I looked at [string range]. I did, but only after he asked, so it had no part in how I wrote the code. Having read it now,
the two
are very similar: both have an immediate form for literal indices and a three-value form for the rest.

As for why [lrange] was never done that way, a comment above TclCompileLrangeCmd says "We only bother because we needed the opcode
anyway
for lassign." So listRangeImm was added for lassign, and compiling [lrange] with literal indices came along as a side benefit. The non-literal case doesn't seem to have been considered.

As for optimizing invokeStk, I haven't tried. It is a much bigger and riskier
change than this one, because that path leaves the bytecode loop through TclNREvalObjv. We measured about 44 ns of call overhead on the faster of
our
machines. If the core team is interested, I'd start by profiling that path with callgrind, with no code change, and see where the time goes.

-Eric

On 10/6/2026 8:23 PM, Ashok wrote:

Certainly worth pursuing I think. My knowledge of the Tcl byte code is
mostly based on cargo culting (blush) so creating a branch in the Tcl
repository so more knowledgeable folks can take a look is worthwhile.
I'm not sure everyone reads c.l.t.

As an aside, I'm a bit surprised that this was not already compiled.
The string range command is very similar to lrange and afaict that
compiles in much the same fashion as your patch for lrange with
support for non-literal arguments (which leads me to wonder if Claude
might have used it as the basis for what it produced). Not sure why
lrange was not implemented the same way.

On a different topic, I wonder if you could ask Claude to optimize
invokeStk* bytecode implementation. I wonder if it is something that
needs to be inherently slower because the additional work involved or
if there is scope there for improvement.

/Ashok

On 10/7/2026 6:49 AM, et99 wrote:

Hi all:

A note first: in the last few months my Claude account (a Pro
subscription, not the free tier) has gained the ability to build and
run code in its own Linux sandbox. Before that, Claude could only
hand me code and I had to do all the testing on my own machine. I
don't know whether this is just my account or a general rollout.

This experiment started as a side effect of a tool Claude and I wrote
to scan every proc in every package of a Magicsplat install, looking
for bytecode problems. I extended it to count which commands are
called through the command table (invokeStk) instead of being
compiled inline. Most of what came up does real work per call
(format, regsub, lsort, ...), so call overhead is a small part of the
cost. The one cheap command that stood out was [lrange] with a non-
literal index: [lrange $l 1 3] already compiles to listRangeImm, but
[lrange $l $i $j] and [lrange $l 1 end-$n] fall back to a full
command call.

I asked Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant), working in its sandbox
with access to the GitHub mirror of the Tcl source, to add a new
listRange instruction that always takes exactly three values from the
stack: the list and both indices. It took about 20 minutes to get a
complete patch with tests, after many build and test runs in the
sandbox, including AddressSanitizer, Tcl's memory-debug build and the
TCL_COMPILE_DEBUG build. I copied the changed files into my own tree,
built, and ran the tests and a benchmark on two of my machines.
Claude ran the same benchmark in its sandbox, which is the third
column below.

Base: Tcl main, commit 78dedf7 (2026-10-05, GitHub mirror).

What changed (66 lines of C added, 16 removed; 161 lines of tests
added):

   generic/tclCompile.h       +1         new opcode INST_LIST_RANGE
   generic/tclCompile.c       +7         instruction table entry
   generic/tclExecute.c       +34        the instruction
   generic/tclCompCmdsGR.c    +23 -16   compile non-literal indices >>> to it
   generic/tclAssembly.c      +1         tcl::unsupported::assemble
can use it
   tests/lrange.test          +85        lrange-6.1 .. 6.14
   tests/compile.test         +38        compile-22.1 .. 22.5
   tests/assemble.test        +38        assemble-7.47 .. 7.50

The instruction does what Tcl_LrangeObjCmd does, in the same order,
so error messages and error precedence are the same as for the
command. A test compares the compiled form against the command for 6
lists and 20 index forms each way, with no differences.

Tests: the full suite gives 509,285 tests (23 more than before), the
same 8 failures before and after (httpProxy.test, which needs network
access). disassemble and getbytecode show the new instruction.

Timing (ns per call, 10-element list, best of 7, before -> after):

                           machine 1    machine 2   Claude's sandbox
   lrange $l $i $j         193 -> 126   117 -> 72   152 -> 98 >>>    lrange $l $i end        232 -> 165   130 -> 93   172 -> 123 >>>    lrange $l 1 end-$n      368 -> 291   200 -> 161  270 -> 212 >>>    lrange $l 1 3 (literal)  38 -> 39     24 -> 23    32 -> 34

The sandbox is a small shared VM, so its numbers are noisier than
mine. The literal case compiles to identical bytecode in both builds,
and its difference changes direction between machines, so I take it
to be build- layout noise. The end-$n gain is smaller because the
string "end-N" is still built and parsed on every call.

Limits: Linux only. I have not built it on Windows or macOS, so MSVC
has not seen it. I have not tried an integer fast path for end-$n.

I am posting this as a data point more than as a proposal. If anyone
on the core team thinks it is worth a ticket, I will file one with
the patch. The patch, the test results and the benchmark script are
here: https://github.com/rocketship88/lrange-inline .

On a side note, I have also found the same assistant good at drafting
documentation for my own projects, especially when using the AI to
build the projects. It needs a human to check the facts, but it makes
a decent first draft. The Readme at github was also written by Claude.

Eric

--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.lang.tcl


Thanks, Ashok.

The push worked. (A correction to my earlier post: my
Fossil username is rocketship98; rocketship88 is my GitHub name.) The
branch is now on core.tcl-lang.org as lrange-inline, check-in 5c9d6b18,
based on trunk a675fa55:

https://core.tcl-lang.org/tcl/info/5c9d6b18

Some follow-up findings. Claude profiled the call path in its sandbox
with callgrind. These are exact instruction counts, not times, and
nothing in the source was changed.

(I haven't repeated the callgrind runs myself so consider this his
preliminary findings).


-------------------------------------------------------------------

Where the cost of a non-inlined call goes. Inline [lrange] saves
about 690 instructions per call:

Table 1. [lrange] forms, instructions per call

form invokeStk listRange fewer
lrange $l 1 3 82 82 0% (already inline)
lrange $l $i $j 1718 1027 40%
lrange $l $i end 2064 1369 34%
lrange $l 1 end-$n 3246 2557 21%

Table 2. Where the 694 saved instructions per call go
(lrange $l $i $j)

evaluator trampoline (EvalObjvCore, TclNRRunCallbacks,
TclNREvalObjv, NRCommand and others) 299
invokeStk instruction + re-entering the bytecode loop 127
interpreter result handling 82
extra object allocation and thread-data lookups 76
Tcl_LrangeObjCmd's own argument handling 66
command lookup (Tcl_GetCommandFromObj) 31
other small items 13
total 694

So the command lookup is not the problem: the name is a literal object
with a cached lookup, and it is only 31 instructions. The cost is the
machinery around the call, and every non-inlined command and every proc
call pays it.



(here Claude and I took a look at what I suggested might be something that could be done for heavy math compute code to avoid the invokeStk entirely)




The math functions show the same thing. All 58 commands in
::tcl::mathfunc compile as push "tcl::mathfunc::NAME" followed by
invokeStk, including with constant arguments. None are inlined.
[expr {abs($x)}] compiles to:

push "tcl::mathfunc::abs"; loadScalar x; invokeStk 2;
tryCvtToNumeric

To estimate what an inline abs could achieve before anyone writes one,
Claude used the assembler ([tcl::unsupported::assemble]) to write
variants of abs directly in TAL, and counted each variant with
callgrind. The rows are:

- "load x; nop" is a probable floor. It loads the value and does no
work, so no real abs bytecode can beat it.
- "load x; uminus" and "load x; uplus" are existing instructions that
do the kind of work an abs would: uminus allocates a new number (as
abs must for a negative value), and uplus checks that the value is
numeric. They approximate what a real abs bytecode might cost.
- "call, as expr emits it" is the real thing, including the final
tryCvtToNumeric.
- The last two rows (marked *) are variants without that final
instruction, or built by hand from existing instructions
(load x; dup; push 0; lt; jumpFalse; uminus). They work today with
no C changes, but they are not exactly equivalent to expr; see the
note below.

x = 7 takes the non-negative path (abs returns its argument); x = -5
takes the negative one (abs creates a new number).

Table 3. abs, instructions per call

variant x = 7 x = -5
load x; nop (floor, no work) 74 74
load x; uminus 218 218
load x; uplus 252 252
call, as expr emits it (with
tryCvtToNumeric) 1075 1069
call, without that final instruction * 861 1013
hand-written in TAL * 298 447

Note on the final instruction. tryCvtToNumeric is not redundant. It
gives the result the canonical string form of its value: with it,
expr {abs($x)} returns 16 for x = 0x10, 7 for x = 0007 and 100.0 for
x = 1e2; without it, the same call returns the argument unchanged. It
costs 56 instructions when abs creates a new number, but 214 when abs
returns its argument, since the shared object has to be copied to drop
the old string form. So an inline abs has to normalize its result in
the same way, which is why the rows marked * understate the cost of an
exact replacement.

Table 4 repeats the comparison for a few other functions, through the
normal expr route. The "by hand" figures are approximate equivalents
written as plain expr operators. They don't treat -0.0 or mixed
integer/double arguments in exactly the same way, so read them as a
guide, not a precise ratio. The functions with no equivalent (int,
sqrt, sin) cost about the same as the others, so for them nearly all
of it is call overhead.

Table 4. expr function calls vs hand-written equivalents
(x = -5, y = 3)

expression call by hand
abs($x) 1069 512
max($x,$y) 1263 504
double($x) 1030 438
int($x) 1073 -
sqrt($y) 1045 -
sin($y) 1167 -

Only about 110 of the roughly 1070 instructions for abs are the abs
work itself. The existing unary instructions (uminus, uplus), which also produce normalized numbers, cost 220 to 250, so a dedicated abs
bytecode would probably land around 250: about 4 times fewer
instructions per call. That is an estimate, since no such opcode exists
yet, and it is per call, not for a whole program. Functions that do real
work, such as sin, would gain less in proportion, because the libm call remains.

If invokeStk itself can't be made cheaper, the next best thing is to
avoid it where possible: more inline compile routines (what the
lrange branch does), and bytecodes for the common math functions (abs,
int, double, round, min, max, sqrt, sin, cos and so on), emitted by the expression compiler with a guard so that redefining a function in
tcl::mathfunc still takes effect. Together with TIP 760 (making
[assemble] public), such bytecodes could also be used directly from
assembler code in heavy numeric procs.

An alternative that avoids the redefinition question is opt-in names
for the fast versions, for example absx or cosx (the naming is open),
which expr would compile straight to the bytecodes, while the ordinary
names keep their current behavior. Transparent inlining helps existing
code, and opt-in names are simpler and safer. Either one is a small,
bounded change per function, similar in size to the listRange change.
I haven't built any of this: the numbers above are measurements of the
current code plus estimates.

Eric



On 10/7/2026 6:14 AM, Ashok wrote:

You should have access now. Please retry.

On 10/7/2026 12:37 PM, et99 wrote:

Ashok,

Thanks for the encouragement. I've created an account on
core.tcl-lang.org (username: rocketship88) and have the change
committed locally on a Fossil branch called lrange-inline, based on
trunk check-in a675fa55 (2026-10-05). I can't push it yet because I
don't have write permission.

Could someone grant me rights to push it, or tell me who to ask? Or, if
you'd rather not, a diff made by Fossil (trunk vs. the branch) is here:

     https://github.com/rocketship88/lrange-inline/blob/main/lrange.diff >>
It touches 8 files under generic/ and tests/. The rest of the experiment
(README, benchmark script, the base files and the changed ones as
side-by-side commits) is at:

     https://github.com/rocketship88/lrange-inline

As in my first post, the code and tests were written by Claude and I
reviewed, built and tested them locally. The tests pass on my builds.


Claude writes:

Ashok asked whether I looked at [string range]. I did, but only after he
asked, so it had no part in how I wrote the code. Having read it now, the two
are very similar: both have an immediate form for literal indices and a
three-value form for the rest.

As for why [lrange] was never done that way, a comment above
TclCompileLrangeCmd says "We only bother because we needed the opcode anyway >> for lassign." So listRangeImm was added for lassign, and compiling [lrange] >> with literal indices came along as a side benefit. The non-literal case
doesn't seem to have been considered.

As for optimizing invokeStk, I haven't tried. It is a much bigger and riskier
change than this one, because that path leaves the bytecode loop through
TclNREvalObjv. We measured about 44 ns of call overhead on the faster of our >> machines. If the core team is interested, I'd start by profiling that path >> with callgrind, with no code change, and see where the time goes.




-Eric


On 10/6/2026 8:23 PM, Ashok wrote:

Certainly worth pursuing I think. My knowledge of the Tcl byte code is mostly based on cargo culting (blush) so creating a branch in the Tcl repository so more knowledgeable folks can take a look is worthwhile. I'm not sure everyone reads c.l.t.

As an aside, I'm a bit surprised that this was not already compiled. The string range command is very similar to lrange and afaict that compiles in much the same fashion as your patch for lrange with support for non-literal arguments (which leads me to wonder if Claude might have used it as the basis for what it produced). Not sure why lrange was not implemented the same way.

On a different topic, I wonder if you could ask Claude to optimize invokeStk* bytecode implementation. I wonder if it is something that needs to be inherently slower because the additional work involved or if there is scope there for improvement.

/Ashok

On 10/7/2026 6:49 AM, et99 wrote:

Hi all:

A note first: in the last few months my Claude account (a Pro subscription, not the free tier) has gained the ability to build and run code in its own Linux sandbox. Before that, Claude could only hand me code and I had to do all the testing on my own machine. I don't know whether this is just my account or a general rollout.

This experiment started as a side effect of a tool Claude and I wrote to scan every proc in every package of a Magicsplat install, looking for bytecode problems. I extended it to count which commands are called through the command table (invokeStk) instead of being compiled inline. Most of what came up does real work per call (format, regsub, lsort, ...), so call overhead is a small part of the cost. The one cheap command that stood out was [lrange] with a non- literal index: [lrange $l 1 3] already compiles to listRangeImm, but [lrange $l $i $j] and [lrange $l 1 end-$n] fall back to a full command call.

I asked Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant), working in its sandbox with access to the GitHub mirror of the Tcl source, to add a new listRange instruction that always takes exactly three values from the stack: the list and both indices. It took about 20 minutes to get a complete patch with tests, after many build and test runs in the sandbox, including AddressSanitizer, Tcl's memory-debug build and the TCL_COMPILE_DEBUG build. I copied the changed files into my own tree, built, and ran the tests and a benchmark on two of my machines. Claude ran the same benchmark in its sandbox, which is the third column below.

Base: Tcl main, commit 78dedf7 (2026-10-05, GitHub mirror).

What changed (66 lines of C added, 16 removed; 161 lines of tests added): >>>>
   generic/tclCompile.h       +1         new opcode INST_LIST_RANGE
   generic/tclCompile.c       +7         instruction table entry
   generic/tclExecute.c       +34        the instruction >>>>    generic/tclCompCmdsGR.c    +23 -16   compile non-literal indices to it
   generic/tclAssembly.c      +1         tcl::unsupported::assemble can use it
   tests/lrange.test          +85        lrange-6.1 .. 6.14
   tests/compile.test         +38        compile-22.1 .. 22.5
   tests/assemble.test        +38        assemble-7.47 .. 7.50

The instruction does what Tcl_LrangeObjCmd does, in the same order, so error messages and error precedence are the same as for the command. A test compares the compiled form against the command for 6 lists and 20 index forms each way, with no differences.

Tests: the full suite gives 509,285 tests (23 more than before), the same 8 failures before and after (httpProxy.test, which needs network access). disassemble and getbytecode show the new instruction.

Timing (ns per call, 10-element list, best of 7, before -> after):

                           machine 1    machine 2   Claude's sandbox
   lrange $l $i $j         193 -> 126   117 -> 72   152 -> 98
   lrange $l $i end        232 -> 165   130 -> 93   172 -> 123
   lrange $l 1 end-$n      368 -> 291   200 -> 161  270 -> 212 >>>>    lrange $l 1 3 (literal)  38 -> 39     24 -> 23    32 -> 34 >>>>
The sandbox is a small shared VM, so its numbers are noisier than mine. The literal case compiles to identical bytecode in both builds, and its difference changes direction between machines, so I take it to be build- layout noise. The end-$n gain is smaller because the string "end-N" is still built and parsed on every call.

Limits: Linux only. I have not built it on Windows or macOS, so MSVC has not seen it. I have not tried an integer fast path for end-$n.

I am posting this as a data point more than as a proposal. If anyone on the core team thinks it is worth a ticket, I will file one with the patch. The patch, the test results and the benchmark script are here: https://github.com/rocketship88/lrange-inline .

On a side note, I have also found the same assistant good at drafting documentation for my own projects, especially when using the AI to build the projects. It needs a human to check the facts, but it makes a decent first draft. The Readme at github was also written by Claude.

Eric

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et99 <[email protected]> posted:

Hi all:

This experiment started as a side effect of a tool Claude and
I wrote to scan every proc in every package of a Magicsplat install,
looking for bytecode problems.

Eric

Is your work something similar to Donal Fellows ("Optimizing Tcl Bytecode") ?
I mean by supplying Donal Fellow's recommendations to Claude, it could
improve something in Tcl speed, at least in the range of functionalities you have explored ?

In fact I don't know if his work has been applied or not.

Olivier.
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On 10/7/2026 12:25 PM, Olivier wrote:

et99 <[email protected]> posted:

Hi all:

This experiment started as a side effect of a tool Claude and
I wrote to scan every proc in every package of a Magicsplat install,
looking for bytecode problems.

Eric

Is your work something similar to Donal Fellows ("Optimizing Tcl Bytecode") ? I mean by supplying Donal Fellow's recommendations to Claude, it could improve something in Tcl speed, at least in the range of functionalities you have explored ?

In fact I don't know if his work has been applied or not.

Olivier.

Hi Olivier:

Short answer: kinda, I'm aware of Donal's peephole work in the core, and the assemble documentation has a section on it. But I imagine he's also working on other optimizations. My own scanning is a different thing, though. It's read-only analysis of compiled bytecode, not an optimizer.

It started with my calc tool (Colin's original = command). All the bytecode tools are unsupported, which is why I wrote TIP 760 to make assemble a supported command. To prepare, I had Claude read the assembler source and explain it to me.

One interesting find along the way: when a command's compile routine hits an error (for example [format %d notanumber] or [string is bogus x]), the compiler doesn't raise a script-level error. It bakes a "syntax" bytecode into the code, which I found in about 8 places in the source. The error only appears at run time, and only if that code is reached, so a mistake can sit dormant in production code for years.

So Claude and I wrote a scanner. Under Magicsplat, with its large package set, we loaded every package we could and used [info proc] to list every proc, since sourcing defines them without running them. Then we used disassemble/getbytecode to force all of them to compile, over 20k procs, and searched the bytecode for the syntax instruction. We found only 8 or 9.

I then added checks for patterns a peephole could optimize. One example is a temp variable whose bytecode could be dropped, but only when no trace or uplevel is in play, since either could need the temp to stay.

Next I looked for commands that were heavily used but not inlined, and found lrange. Since Claude can now build Tcl in his sandbox and test his own code, I asked him to inline it. He did, and he used validation tools I'd never heard of.

I'm having tons of fun with this. It may be my $20 a month level that makes it work so well, but it beats a cable subscription. :)

-eric
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et99 <[email protected]> posted:

On 10/7/2026 12:25 PM, Olivier wrote:

et99 <[email protected]> posted:

Hi all:

This experiment started as a side effect of a tool Claude and
I wrote to scan every proc in every package of a Magicsplat install,
looking for bytecode problems.

Eric

Is your work something similar to Donal Fellows ("Optimizing Tcl Bytecode") ?
I mean by supplying Donal Fellow's recommendations to Claude, it could improve something in Tcl speed, at least in the range of functionalities you have explored ?

In fact I don't know if his work has been applied or not.

Olivier.

Hi Olivier:

Short answer: kinda, I'm aware of Donal's peephole work in the core, and the assemble documentation has a section on it. But I imagine he's also working on other optimizations. My own scanning is a different thing, though. It's read-only analysis of compiled bytecode, not an optimizer.

Next I looked for commands that were heavily used but not inlined, and found lrange. Since Claude can now build Tcl in his sandbox and test his own code, I asked him to inline it. He did, and he used validation tools I'd never heard of.

I'm having tons of fun with this. It may be my $20 a month level that makes it work so well, but it beats a cable subscription. :)

-eric

This is the question I had in mind but dare not to ask. 20 $ to analyze
20 000 procedures, it is not expensive but there is probably some dumping
at the moment. Improving code with AI under the look of experimented programmers
can be a good thing once we really know the actual cost for it.
Thanks for having report your work, it is very interesting.

Olivier.
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et99 <[email protected]> wrote:

One interesting find along the way: when a command's compile routine
hits an error (for example [format %d notanumber] or [string is bogus
x]), the compiler doesn't raise a script-level error. It bakes a
"syntax" bytecode into the code, which I found in about 8 places in
the source. The error only appears at run time, and only if that
code is reached, so a mistake can sit dormant in production code for
years.

That is likely to match Tcl interpreted script behavior. An 'if'
clause (say for checking for an incorrect data in a var) that is not
exercised by an explicit test can also hold a syntax error (the
interpreter will only care that the 'if' body has matching curly braces
at parse time) that can lay dormant until one day, years in the future,
the incorrect data being tested for finally makes the 'if' test true,
then the body is executed, and the syntax error can manifest itself.
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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.tcl

On 10/6/2026 9:19 PM, et99 wrote:

I asked Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant), working in its sandbox with access to the GitHub mirror of the Tcl source, to add a new listRange instruction that always takes exactly three values from the stack: the
list and both indices. It took about 20 minutes to get a complete patch
with tests, after many build and test runs in the sandbox, including AddressSanitizer, Tcl's memory-debug build and the TCL_COMPILE_DEBUG
build. I copied the changed files into my own tree, built, and ran the
tests and a benchmark on two of my machines. Claude ran the same
benchmark in its sandbox, which is the third column below.

An AI assistant already knows about bytecodes to the degree that it can optimize it? Truly impressive.

Question/Suggestion: Expect on Windows is basically abandoned software
at this point, and other platforms may follow suit soon. It is a nice
piece of software and it seems to be popular enough to receive attention
in articles and blogs here and there.

I wonder with your experience in directing Claude if it can offer a
solution.


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On 10/8/2026 7:07 AM, Rich wrote:

et99 <[email protected]> wrote:

One interesting find along the way: when a command's compile routine
hits an error (for example [format %d notanumber] or [string is bogus
x]), the compiler doesn't raise a script-level error. It bakes a
"syntax" bytecode into the code, which I found in about 8 places in
the source. The error only appears at run time, and only if that
code is reached, so a mistake can sit dormant in production code for
years.

That is likely to match Tcl interpreted script behavior. An 'if'
clause (say for checking for an incorrect data in a var) that is not exercised by an explicit test can also hold a syntax error (the
interpreter will only care that the 'if' body has matching curly braces
at parse time) that can lay dormant until one day, years in the future,
the incorrect data being tested for finally makes the 'if' test true,
then the body is executed, and the syntax error can manifest itself.

Yes, quite true. The trick here was to use the fact that the compiler already found an error, but simply stashed that info away. Using getbytecode (better than disassemble, since the later truncates some text) one can find the syntax error bytecode. It has a specific signature, two pushes and then the syntax bytecode.

In order to load all the packages, I needed to use a subprocess to first try to do the package require, since many would fail, and a few would crash or hang tcl when trying, maybe on loading a dll. If they loaded, then the main process would use them.

The ones that are t1-t7 were my test cases based on finding them in the tcl core code via a grep search.

if { $known } {
proc t1 {} {format %d nontanumber; set foo bar; format %x foo}
proc t2 {} { throw {"} "some message" }
proc t3 {} { subst {[format}} ;# "
proc t4 {} { string is bogus "somevalue" }
proc t5 {} { tcl::unsupported::assemble {push 1
push 2} }
proc t6 {} { tcl::unsupported::assemble {bogusOpcode} }


# t7: trips TclCompileScript's own "too many nested compilations (infinite
# loop?)" guard (iPtr->numLevels / 5 > iPtr->maxNestingDepth / 4). This is a
# compile-time recursion-depth check against runaway nested compilation of
# things like deeply nested "if" bodies -- 2000 levels comfortably clears
# the default threshold (~1250 with the default recursionlimit of 1000)
# with margin to spare on builds with a different default.
proc make_nested_if_body {n} {
set open [string repeat "if {1} {" $n]
set close [string repeat "}" $n]
return "${open}set x 1${close}"
}
interp recursionlimit {} 50
proc t7 {} [make_nested_if_body 500]
}


Here's the output. There's one that appears to have been the result of copy/paste of some code into several places. In the case of format, it only does this if everything is literal text, i.e. not a variable.


Discovered 917 package(s); 804 loaded into this interpreter, 113 failed.

=== Packages that failed to load ===

<snip>

Found 22991 procs - scanning now please wait

=== Procs that errored during getbytecode ===
:::: ":::" isn't a procedure

=== Procs with a bytecode-level (dormant) error opcode ===




<These were from my test cases>:




::t1 (2 occurrence(s))
at offset 10:
message : expected integer but got "nontanumber"
errorcode: TCL VALUE NUMBER
-code : 1

at offset 41:
message : expected integer but got "foo"
errorcode: TCL VALUE NUMBER
-code : 1

::t2 (1 occurrence(s))
at offset 16:
message : unmatched open quote in list
errorcode: TCL VALUE LIST QUOTE
-code : 1

::t3 (1 occurrence(s))
at offset 15:
message : missing close-bracket
errorcode: NONE
-code : 1

::t4 (1 occurrence(s))
at offset 10:
message : bad class "bogus": must be alnum, alpha, ascii, control, boolean, dict, digit, double, entier, false, graph, integer, li... (truncated, 197 chars total)
errorcode: TCL LOOKUP INDEX class bogus
-code : 1

::t5 (1 occurrence(s))
at offset 10:
message : stack is unbalanced on exit from the code (depth=2)
errorcode: TCL ASSEM BADSTACK
-code : 1

::t6 (1 occurrence(s))
at offset 10:
message : bad instruction "bogusOpcode": must be push, add, append, appendArray, appendArrayStk, appendStk, arrayExistsImm, arrayE... (truncated, 1661 chars total)
errorcode: TCL LOOKUP INDEX instruction bogusOpcode
-code : 1

::t7 (1 occurrence(s))
at offset 10:
message : too many nested compilations (infinite loop?)
errorcode: TCL LIMIT STACK
-code : 1



<These are from the packages>:




::asn::asnGetT61String (1 occurrence(s))
at offset 444:
message : not enough arguments for all format specifiers
errorcode: TCL FORMAT FIELDVARMISMATCH
-code : 1

::controlwidget::verticalAxis::Snit_methodcomputeLogHeight (1 occurrence(s))
at offset 279:
message : unbalanced open paren
in expression "...tom) - $options(-ytop)"
errorcode: TCL PARSE EXPR UNBALANCED
-code : 1

::math::geometry::areaParallellogram (1 occurrence(s))
at offset 88:
message : unbalanced open paren
in expression "...($x2 * $y1 - $x1 * $y2"
errorcode: TCL PARSE EXPR UNBALANCED
-code : 1

::critcl::MakeScalarLimited (1 occurrence(s))
at offset 2155:
message : missing operator at _@_
in expression "$minop_@_$maxop eq ">=<=")"
errorcode: TCL PARSE EXPR MISSING
-code : 1

::diagram::core::geo::areaParallellogram (1 occurrence(s))
at offset 88:
message : unbalanced open paren
in expression "...($x2 * $y1 - $x1 * $y2"
errorcode: TCL PARSE EXPR UNBALANCED
-code : 1

::diagram::basic::geo::areaParallellogram (1 occurrence(s))
at offset 88:
message : unbalanced open paren
in expression "...($x2 * $y1 - $x1 * $y2"
errorcode: TCL PARSE EXPR UNBALANCED
-code : 1

::diagram::element::geo::areaParallellogram (1 occurrence(s))
at offset 88:
message : unbalanced open paren
in expression "...($x2 * $y1 - $x1 * $y2"
errorcode: TCL PARSE EXPR UNBALANCED
-code : 1

::diagram::point::geo::areaParallellogram (1 occurrence(s))
at offset 88:
message : unbalanced open paren
in expression "...($x2 * $y1 - $x1 * $y2"
errorcode: TCL PARSE EXPR UNBALANCED
-code : 1

Done


-et


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On 10/8/2026 1:23 AM, Olivier wrote:

<snip>
This is the question I had in mind but dare not to ask. 20 $ to analyze
20 000 procedures, it is not expensive but there is probably some dumping
at the moment. Improving code with AI under the look of experimented programmers
can be a good thing once we really know the actual cost for it.
Thanks for having report your work, it is very interesting.

Olivier.

The $20 isn't the cost of doing the scan. That I did on my own computer, although claude also ran it in his sandbox to check the coding. The $20 pro subscription lets me work with claude without interruption where the free tier would often make you wait for a new 5 hour block to start using again. There's also a weekly limit, but I've never exceeded that. The 5 hour limit is still there with pro, but allows me much more usage. You can check the status page to see where you are and when getting close it tells you.

I also have a small $10 wallet that can be used (and replenished) on a per use to continue after reaching the limit. This year, I've used only $2.70 of it.

I think the 20 minutes he took to analyze then code the inlining of lrange might have used 5-10% of my 5 hour allocation.

-et



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On 10/8/2026 11:34 AM, saito wrote:

On 10/6/2026 9:19 PM, et99 wrote:

I asked Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant), working in its sandbox with access to the GitHub mirror of the Tcl source, to add a new listRange instruction that always takes exactly three values from the stack: the list and both indices. It took about 20 minutes to get a complete patch with tests, after many build and test runs in the sandbox, including AddressSanitizer, Tcl's memory-debug build and the TCL_COMPILE_DEBUG build. I copied the changed files into my own tree, built, and ran the tests and a benchmark on two of my machines. Claude ran the same benchmark in its sandbox, which is the third column below.

An AI assistant already knows about bytecodes to the degree that it can optimize it? Truly impressive.

Question/Suggestion: Expect on Windows is basically abandoned software at this point, and other platforms may follow suit soon. It is a nice piece of software and it seems to be popular enough to receive attention in articles and blogs here and there.

I wonder with your experience in directing Claude if it can offer a solution.

Well, the only way to find out is to give him the code to look at. In my bytecode experimenting I found some wiki code written back in 2013 by Richard Suchenwirth which no longer worked because of changes in the dissasembler output. Claude read the code, and resurrected it. This was a small case, but, if you can paste in all the code, he could probably give you an answer.

The one thing that does come up a lot is that he isn't able to read just everything on the internet. Many sites block his access. He had to find a way to get to the tcl source code using a github mirror, where I normally just access it directly at https://core.tcl-lang.org.

He only seems to have a linux sandbox, so you would have to do the testing for him. But with the sandbox, things are so much faster, he gives me code that he's checked himself now rather than code that I have to test. This means much less back and forth. I'm afraid with Expect on windows, you'd have to be his tester.

-et

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On 10/8/2026 12:24 PM, et99 wrote:

On 10/8/2026 11:34 AM, saito wrote:

On 10/6/2026 9:19 PM, et99 wrote:

I'm afraid with Expect on windows, you'd have to be his tester.

I stand corrected on this, if you look at today's core email by Serhiy Storchaka on the bug fixes he's been working on lately, and quite rapidly, he says he uses claude code and it does have a vm sandbox for windows 11.

Claude code is a different product/tier than the claude pro I use.

-e

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On 10/8/2026 6:41 PM, et99 wrote:

On 10/8/2026 12:24 PM, et99 wrote:

On 10/8/2026 11:34 AM, saito wrote:

On 10/6/2026 9:19 PM, et99 wrote:

I'm afraid with Expect on windows, you'd have to be his tester.

I stand corrected on this, if you look at today's core email by Serhiy Storchaka on the bug fixes he's been working on lately, and quite
rapidly, he says he uses claude code and it does have a vm sandbox for windows 11.

Claude code is a different product/tier than the claude pro I use.

Thanks for the info. I can test it if there is a package ready for
package req command. Otherwise, I am not able to spend any time on this unfortunately at the moment. Indeed it would be interesting to spend
sometime with these agents to build and fix things.


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Well, again I was wrong. Claude doesn't have a windows vm, it appears that Serhly has one and allows claude access to it over ssh. I found that the pro level includes claude code, but it's rather command line oriented, and I don't know if there's a web interface also.

I did however just load the claude app on my phone, but couldn't figure out how to get notifications to show up on the phone for knowing when claude on my desktop needed to ask permission or tell me he was done. But it has a text to speech button with a very nice voice.

-et



On 10/9/2026 2:10 PM, saito wrote:

On 10/8/2026 6:41 PM, et99 wrote:

On 10/8/2026 12:24 PM, et99 wrote:

On 10/8/2026 11:34 AM, saito wrote:

On 10/6/2026 9:19 PM, et99 wrote:

I'm afraid with Expect on windows, you'd have to be his tester.

I stand corrected on this, if you look at today's core email by Serhiy Storchaka on the bug fixes he's been working on lately, and quite rapidly, he says he uses claude code and it does have a vm sandbox for windows 11.

Claude code is a different product/tier than the claude pro I use.

Thanks for the info. I can test it if there is a package ready for package req command. Otherwise, I am not able to spend any time on this unfortunately at the moment. Indeed it would be interesting to spend sometime with these agents to build and fix things.

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