Blu-ice and Dcss have previously used TCL code to handle the parsing of DCS messages. This TCL code had a drawback: the handling of messages slowed as the backlog of unhandled messages increased.
In order to speed up the handling of the protocol at connection time and during times of many motors moving simultaneously, a C library was created to handle the parsing of the messages.
At start-up, the Blu-Ice code will search for the C library and will use the optimized code if available. If the library is not available, the TCL-only code will be used automatically.