[comp.sys.mac.hypercard] Script Compiler ???

hardeveld_b@pttrnl.nl (07/30/90)

I just received the summer catalogue from Heizer software from California.
It mentions a hyper and supercard script compiler "CompileIt, version 1.5"
Does anybody have any experience with this tool? Does it really work with
Supercard scripts as well? Which performance increase can be expected? 
Questions, Questions. Please give answers.

mxmora@unix.SRI.COM (Matt Mora) (08/01/90)

In article <38101.26b46511@pttrnl.nl> hardeveld_b@pttrnl.nl writes:
>
>I just received the summer catalogue from Heizer software from California.
>It mentions a hyper and supercard script compiler "CompileIt, version 1.5"
>Does anybody have any experience with this tool? Does it really work with

On a project I was working for a client, They wanted to see if compileit!
would help speed up their project and help hide their scripts. They were
using beta Supercard 1.5. CompileIT! works much better with Hypercard.
Of the few scripts that I managed to compile in Supercard, only one
worked. The others after a lot of tweaking of the script, finaly compiled.
Then the script no longer worked. It had something to do with the setting of 
properties that didn't work. Only certain commands are actualy compiled and
any others that CompileIT! doesn't understand will be sent back to HC/SC
for execution (i.e a Callback). 

Of the hypercard scripts that I compiled, four out of five compiled and
ran without modification. The speed difference is amazing. If your
scripts contain mostly compileable code (I mean code that Compileit!
actualy coverts into 680x0 code) then the performance incredable.
Any callbacks that the xcmd has to make will of course execute at the
hypercard interpreter speed ( and may also be slower because of all the 
overhead involved in sendiong and parsing of the callbacks). 

The manual is pretty good at explaining how to get better performance
out of your scripts and Xcmds.

Overall its a pretty good product. I don't know if it will be very
useful after HC 2.0 comes out. Another thing you might want to
look in to is hyperBASIC.

To anwser your question, It depends on the the type of scripts you
write for supercard. A lot of the features of supercard are not available
yet to the compiler so somthing you wont beable to compile. But you can
modify CompileIt! yourself and add comands to its symbol table. This 
I have not tried yet. If I knew how to convert Hypertalk/Supertalk commands
to 680x0 code then I would probably write my own compiler :-)





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Matthew Mora                |   my Mac  Matt_Mora@sri.com
SRI International           |  my unix  mxmora@unix.sri.com
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