> It was a great experience, however as one the persons responsible to optimize Tcl code into C modules, and part of the .NET migration team, I learned to never consider languages without a JIT/AOT compiler for nothing serious beyond OS scripting tasks.

As a slight aside, I once worked on a molecular dynamics simulation program which used Tcl for the basic setup, and then performance critical parts were done in C. A fine enough approach, except that the original authors had decided that the one hammer to get good performance out of C was inlining. And they used this everywhere. Literally everywhere. Everything except for main() and some I/O functions was defined in "static inline" functions in header files.