compileIt for revolution?

[Richard Gaskin]

Rob Cozens wrote:
> I'm really sorry your experience with CompileIt! was such that you 
> didn't get it.

I believe got it:  I wrote a few dozen externals with it, bundled 'em up 
into a commercial product, and they paid my rent for a year.

While I enjoyed it (or more specifically, Mark Hanrek's souped-up 
version of it), not everyone did.  Even at the peak of CompileIt's 
popularity Rinaldi, Calhoun, and many other prolific externals authors 
preferred to work in other languages.

My point about Compile! is not that it's not a good time, but merely 
that it's not a panacea. To use it efficiently required lower-level ways 
of doing things, and after the user has come to understand pointers, 
handles, data types, and the OS APIs the difference between learning 
CompileItSpeak and C is indeed there but the gulf isn't very wide.

There may be a market for such a compiler and if so I might use it 
myself.  But given what it takes to build such a critter for Rev and 
what would be required to use it, don't be surprised if it takes a long 
time to reach a positive ROI.

In the meantime there are obvious deficiencies in the current externals 
package, and I hope they've been brought to RunRev's attention and that 
they are addressing them.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
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