extra commands for Tcl by Peter De Rijk (Universiteit Antwerpen)
Extral is a generally useful library which extends Tcl with a.o.:
- extral list manipulation commands
- extra string manipulation commands
- array manipulation
- map
- atexit
- tempfile
- filing commands
The name comes from the fact that ExtraL originally only contained extra list processing commands to overcome some of the performance problems in Tcl when processing large lists. Later other commands were added. With the advent of the Tcl byte compiler, the performance is not such a great issue any longer, but many of the list manipulation functions are still very convenient, and some of those that were now rewritten using the object system in C are still faster. Most functions are now also available in Tcl-only form as well. Using the C code just gives a speedup.
Documentation is available on https://derijkp.github.io/Extral/index.html (and in the docs directory). For some of the commands, you can also find out a lot by checking the testing suite in the directory tests.
You should be able to obtain the latest version of ExtraL on github at https://github.com/derijkp/Extral
A portable binary ExtraL package can be "installed" by downloading it from github
- Extral-2.1.0-Linux-x86_64.tar.gz (Linux)
- Extral-2.1.0-windows-x86_64.tar.gz (Windows)
and unpacking it where Tcl can find it.
The command
package require Extral
will load the package. A binary package does not necesarily contains compiled code: If no compiled version (.so, .dll) is available, a Tcl-only version will be used. The compiled version is made in such a way that it will also run on older Linux systems.
Extral includes the build script to create these portable binaries. It is based on Holy Build Box (https://github.com/phusion/holy-build-box) which uses docker to provide a compatible build environment. Access to docker is required for this. This build expects a hbb install of dirtcl (https://github.com/derijkp/dirtcl) on the system, so this has to be installed first. Then you can do the install using (in the Extral source directory):
./build/hbb_build_Extral.sh
You can also build the Windows version on Linux using this script (using crosscompilation):
./build/hbb_build_Extral.sh -arch win
Extral follows TEA, and can be compiled using the normal configure/make workflow: Compiled packages should be created using the following steps in the package directory: (You can also build in any other directory, if you change the path to the configure command)
./configure
make
make install
The configure command has several options that can be examined using
./configure --help
During compilation, the Tcl sources must be available; if the Tcl source directory is not a sibling of the Extral source directory, you will have to specify its position by giving a parameter to the ./configure script:
./configure --with-tcl=DIR (where DIR is the Tcl source tree)
in the following description.
Peter De Rijk University of Antwerp VIB department of Molecular Genetics Universiteitsplein 1 B-2610 Antwerp
Tel. +32 3 265 10 30 E-mail: Peter.DeRijk@molgen.vib-ua.be
ExtraL is Copyright Peter De Rijk, University of Antwerp, 1995 The following terms apply to all files associated with the software unless explicitly disclaimed in individual files.
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