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Not really. I did some prime number crunching and it's the slowest of them all. Maybe for simple scripts working with strings, but otherwise I'd pick Lua any day. LuaJIT just runs circles around other dynamic languages, only compiled stuff is able to beat it.

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Tcl - or Ruby, Python without NumPy (which is an extension) or most scripting languages are not the right tool for the job for number crunching.

Right - both Python and Tcl/Tk are intended to offload heavy processing to C functions that they stitch together with high level controls.

As DavidW points out Out of the box Tcl (like most scripting languages) was never designed for numeric processing. If you want to do numerics and number crunching in Tcl use one of the extensions such as Vectcl or the Mathemtcl. Tcl's C APi makes writing extensions (or wrapping existing libs) pretty straight forward too.

Note that the toplevel link is to a page full of simple techniques for enhancing base Tcl with C, Fortran, Lua etc. code, suggesting that Tcl offers the shortest path from dynamic language to serious number crunching power when it is needed.

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