aol32+ad12 refers to patches supplied by aD, due to Rob Mayoff. You'll need it to run OpenACS 4.x because the code depends on his ns_cache implementation. He'll soon be releasing ad13 (on Friday the 13th? Hey, that would be sweet!) and that will become bundled up as our first CVS snapshot at OpenNSD.org, hopefully.
Compiling in Tcl 8x is transparent, it compiles to bytecode on demand.
What Rob did was modify OpenNSD to cache those compiled bytecode bytes so your .tcl page doesn't have to be recompiled everytime a user hits it, just the first time the Tcl interpreter associated with a given OpenNSD thread runs into it.
