Jade contains a rudimentary Lisp compiler; this takes a Lisp form or program and compiles it into a byte-code form. This byte-code form contains a string of byte instructions, a vector of data constants and some other information.
The main reason for compiling your programs is to increase their speed, it is difficult to quantify the speed increase gained -- some programs (especially those using a lot of macros) will execute many times quicker than their uncompiled version whereas others may only execute a bit quicker.
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