Heizer Software is gone. Royal Software is gone. Nobody sells CompileIt
any more.
If you are still using HyperCard like I am, CompileIt is probably still useful to you. However, nothing HyperCard-ish runs on the new Pentium-based Apple eunuchs computers (nevermind what Apple calls them, they are not Macintosh), so we are stuck with older equipment.
Richard Lawson has posted a short "interview" of me on CompileIt and the MacOS for your enjoyment.
I guess I still own CompileIt, even if I can't give you a user manual for it (unfortunately, I do not own the copyright to the manual). Somebody OCRed the CompileIt user manual, but it's PrettyDarnFoolish (which is already hard to read and cannot even be opened in some computers) and full of errors, some of them unintelligible. I extracted the text and will try to work through it, but it will take a while.
Download free CompileIt! Demo, with the 10-line limit removed. If there's enough interest, maybe I can upload the full commercial version, perhaps as shareware. Not a lot of interest so far, but M.Uli Kusterer packed the original CompileIt 2.6.1 disks into Stuffit format, which you can download here. Have fun!
CompileIt1of3.sitThe commercial version of CompileIt has full access to all (68K) ToolBox calls and can generate just about any (again 68K) code resource. I have done INITs and whole programs strictly in CompileIt. In fact, after CompileIt was working (1994) everything I ever did on the Mac (including CompileIt itself) was compiled in CompileIt -- until 2004, when I started migrating my tool base to the new language I call Turkish Demitasse (T2). Most of the tools I used in the transition to T2 were still running in HyperCard and/or CompileIt.
CompileIt2of3.sit
CompileIt3of3.sit
I also uploaded a copy of Double-XX/Lite, for building full HyperCard-like applications in CompileIt. It includes a simple text editor as a demo, but I doubt if it will compile on the Demo version of CompileIt.
The full version of DoubleXX supports AppleScript and has a lot more HyperCard-like commands that you can use in your compiled scripts, plus the ability to bypass the text callback mechanism for faster execution. Unfortunately the user manual (which I also do not own) is a lot more necessary for understanding how to run DoubleXX.
I can't find any release disks for Double-XX, but I looked around in my archives and collected everything that looked like it was relevant, and packaged it up as a downloadable XX.img disk image. I even found my original reference manual document, but it's in MacWrite, which does not run on later Macs. I searched the internet and located some code that extracts the text from MacWrite files, and rewrote it as a CompileIt XCMD, so I was able to get most of the manual out (without formatting or pictures). I cut it up into page-sized chunks and pasted it into a stack, which I also included.
I see that both CompileIt and Double-XX are also available on the MacintoshGarden archive site.
When HyperCard was converted to PPC I tried converting CompileIt to generate PPC native code, but it got too messy and I gave up. That was about the time I had a falling away with Ro Nagey, so basically everything came to a halt. It was my fault, and he was rightfully unhappy about the mess, but we seem to be OK now. In any case, Apple went to a Just-in-Time runtime compiler which ran 68K code almost as fast as native PPC code, so the conversion became irrelevant. I still do a lot of 68K emulation on this 400MHz PPC MacOS/9, and it runs way faster than native x86 code written in C++ on a 2GHz dual Wintel box. Go figure.
Tom Pittman
2013 April 16