gf07+@andrew.cmu.edu (Gordon Maskew Fair, III) (11/15/89)
Hello, I was at a conference recently and a person mentioned to me about an existing compiler for hypercard which would turn scripts into Xcmds which would increase the speed of hypercard immensely. Is there such an application and if so can you give me more info on this? What I am really interested in is increasing the speed of hypercard as much as possible. If there are any other ways of doing this I would also greatly appreciate your ideas. Thank you (now and in advance) Gordon Fair
rieman@boulder.Colorado.EDU (John Rieman) (11/15/89)
There's a product called CompileIt from Heizer Software,
1-800-888-7667, which transforms some hypercard scripts
into xcmds/xfcns. I was about to buy this, but replies
to a network query of "is it any good?" convinced me not
to.
So, my second-hand knowledge is: Compilation is very slow --
like several hours for even some small scripts. The program
itself is written in Hypercard, with a few x-stuff. But it
won't compile itself. For the things it does compile, it
really does give you a speed-up. For the things it won't
compile, you may have a long wait before it gives a "can't
do it" error message. It compiles individual modules ("on
foo ..." and functions), not entire scripts.
I think if you have some simple scripts with a few, time-critical
subroutines, CompileIt might be a good alternative to working
in C or Pascal. It doesn't seem to be the answer to magically
giving you a ten-to-one speedup on an entire project.
CompileIt also gives you access to the Toolbox. I called the
above number and talked to a knowledgeable person, who was
pretty helpful. Maybe someone else on the net has actually
used CompileIt and can update this info.
-john