Tcl'2002 Vancouver, BC CA 0-123-45678-9
1
Andreas Kupries ActiveState Corp 580 Granville Vancouver, BC CA
As part of a contract with Cisco for their migration of the Tcl interpreter embedded in IOS, their router OS, from version 7.6 to version 8.3.4, ActiveState was tasked with reducing the static and stack memory requirements of the Tcl core. To this end, it modularized the 8.3.4 Tcl core so that features not required by Cisco could be compiled out of the core. This reduced the static size of the core, and reduced the load on the C stack by moving big structures to heap. Here we describe our experiences with performing these tasks, the techniques we used, the difficulties we had, and our conclusions regarding the future work on these tasks.