MetaCard > Runtime Revolution > LiveCode
Posted: Tue Sep 14, 2021 7:53 pm
I don't think it's possible to NOT talk about LC when we're talking about xTalk implementations!
As I understand it's history, and please correct me if I'm wrong because I didn't know much of anything about LC until around the time of the OpenSource Kickstarter campaign (2013), LC began its life as MetaCard, a HyperCard clone for Unix in the early 1990s. Sometime in later in the 1990s it moved towards being cross platform running on Linux, macOS, Windows and still ran on variations of Unix (like SunOS) as well... Then sometime in the early 2000s Kevin Miller and Co. took over from that with a new company called Runtime Revolution (RunRev), and finally changed the name to LiveCode Ltd. a few years later.
As much as LC's user like to complain (including sometimes me), LiveCode has in my opinion pushed xTalk much further than any other implimentation, and added an xTalk middleware language called LiveCode Builder (LCB) to enable users to create their own GUI widgets, precompiled byte code libraries, and tap into foreign libraries and system APIs with it's Foreign Function Interface (FFI). I could not have started to do some of the things I wanted to do without LCB. There's not much financial incentive in tools to make MIDI toys for Live Code Jamming with GarageBand or other DAWs. ("Live coding for realtime interactive music performances" was actually a thing long before LiveCode Ltd. see the history of Max/MSP and Pure Data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Data). LCB seems to me to be a LOT like the idea behind Heizer Software’s CompileIt! for HyperCard, a system where you could compile add-ons for HyperCard by coding them in HyperTalk Script + Mac toolbox calls and then compile that into much faster assembly / Motorola68K machine code add-ons (XCMD/XFCNs resources) for HC. http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/ma ... index.html
As I understand it's history, and please correct me if I'm wrong because I didn't know much of anything about LC until around the time of the OpenSource Kickstarter campaign (2013), LC began its life as MetaCard, a HyperCard clone for Unix in the early 1990s. Sometime in later in the 1990s it moved towards being cross platform running on Linux, macOS, Windows and still ran on variations of Unix (like SunOS) as well... Then sometime in the early 2000s Kevin Miller and Co. took over from that with a new company called Runtime Revolution (RunRev), and finally changed the name to LiveCode Ltd. a few years later.
As much as LC's user like to complain (including sometimes me), LiveCode has in my opinion pushed xTalk much further than any other implimentation, and added an xTalk middleware language called LiveCode Builder (LCB) to enable users to create their own GUI widgets, precompiled byte code libraries, and tap into foreign libraries and system APIs with it's Foreign Function Interface (FFI). I could not have started to do some of the things I wanted to do without LCB. There's not much financial incentive in tools to make MIDI toys for Live Code Jamming with GarageBand or other DAWs. ("Live coding for realtime interactive music performances" was actually a thing long before LiveCode Ltd. see the history of Max/MSP and Pure Data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Data). LCB seems to me to be a LOT like the idea behind Heizer Software’s CompileIt! for HyperCard, a system where you could compile add-ons for HyperCard by coding them in HyperTalk Script + Mac toolbox calls and then compile that into much faster assembly / Motorola68K machine code add-ons (XCMD/XFCNs resources) for HC. http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/ma ... index.html