Runtime Revolution

Runtime Revolution is a cross-platform rapid application development environment built around an English-like scripting language originally called Transcript. Developed by Runtime Revolution Ltd. of Edinburgh, Scotland, it belongs to the xTalk family of languages — the lineage that began with Apple’s HyperCard and its HyperTalk language — and was designed so that a single program, written in a notably readable, sentence-like syntax, could run on Mac, Windows, and Linux from one source. The product later became better known under the name LiveCode, but for most of the 2000s it was sold and discussed as Revolution by Runtime Revolution, the company.

History and Origins

The story has two intertwined threads: an engine and a company.

The engine begins with MetaCard, a cross-platform, commercial HyperCard clone. MetaCard Corporation, founded by Scott Raney around 1990, set out to build a more productive application-development environment for Unix workstations, and the first release of MetaCard appeared in 1992. MetaCard bundled an IDE, a GUI toolkit, and its own scripting language, MetaTalk, a member of the same xTalk family as HyperCard’s HyperTalk.

The company thread begins in 1997, when Kevin Miller founded Runtime Revolution Ltd. in Edinburgh. The firm grew out of earlier work (as Cross Worlds Computing) building applications on top of the MetaCard platform; along the way it created its own IDE for the MetaCard engine and called it Revolution. In 2001, Revolution 1.0 was introduced as a full development environment, pairing that MetaCard-derived engine with the Transcript language.

Note on dates: Runtime Revolution Ltd. was founded in 1997, but the Revolution development environment and its Transcript language first shipped in 2001. The underlying MetaCard engine is older still, dating to the early 1990s. These three milestones are distinct, and this page treats 1997 as the founding of the platform’s parent company.

The two threads merged formally in 2003, when Runtime Revolution acquired the MetaCard engine technology from MetaCard Corporation (announced on 8 July 2003). From that point, the company owned the engine that had quietly powered its product from the start, and continued developing it under the Revolution brand.

Design Philosophy

Runtime Revolution inherited HyperCard’s central idea: that ordinary people, not just professional programmers, should be able to build software. Two principles flow from that.

Readable, English-like syntax. Transcript reads close to plain English. Where a conventional language might write a terse expression, an xTalk handler tends to spell things out:

on mouseUp
   put "Hello, World!" into field "greeting"
   set the backgroundColor of button "ok" to "green"
end mouseUp

The goal is that a script should be approachable on first reading, even by someone who has never seen the language before.

Object and message orientation. Programs are organized around a hierarchy of visual objects — stacks (documents/windows), cards (screens), and controls such as buttons and fields — each of which can carry its own scripts. User and system actions generate messages (events) like mouseUp or openCard, which travel up a well-defined message path until a handler responds. This event-driven, object-oriented model means much of an application is assembled by placing objects and attaching short handlers to them, rather than by writing a monolithic program.

Key Features

• One source, multiple platforms. A single Transcript application could be built and deployed to Mac, Windows, and Linux, a strong selling point in an era when cross-platform GUI development was painful.
• Live, interpreted development. Objects can be created visually and scripted immediately, with changes taking effect without a separate compile-and-link step — a fast, exploratory workflow descended directly from HyperCard.
• Largely typeless values. In keeping with the xTalk tradition, values are weakly and dynamically typed: a piece of data can be treated as text or as a number depending on context, which keeps simple scripts short at the cost of some compile-time checking.
• Integrated GUI toolkit. The environment ships with native-feeling interface controls, so building a windowed application does not require an external UI framework.
• The message path. Events propagate through a predictable hierarchy of objects, giving a clear and learnable model for where to place behavior.

Evolution

Through the 2000s, Revolution advanced through successive major releases under the Runtime Revolution name, broadening the IDE, the Transcript language, and the range of supported platforms. The product earned mainstream recognition when it won the Macworld Annual Editors’ Choice Award for Best Development Software in 2004.

In autumn 2010, the product was renamed LiveCode, and a deployment option for iOS followed in December of that year, extending the xTalk model to mobile. In April 2013, after a successful Kickstarter campaign, an open-source LiveCode Community Edition 6.0 was released under the GPL alongside the commercial editions. In March 2015, the company itself was renamed LiveCode Ltd. to match the product. The open-source Community edition was later discontinued on 31 August 2021, starting with version 9.6.4, with commercial editions continuing the lineage.

Current Relevance

The platform that began as Revolution remains active today under the LiveCode name, so the Transcript language and its MetaCard-derived engine never truly went away — they were rebranded and extended to mobile and server targets. As “Runtime Revolution,” the product belongs to a specific and well-remembered chapter of 2000s cross-platform development, when the promise of write-once, run-on-Mac-Windows-and-Linux drew a devoted community of independent developers and educators.

Why It Matters

Runtime Revolution is a key link in the chain that connects Apple’s HyperCard — one of the most influential “programming for everyone” tools ever made — to a living, modern, cross-platform product. By taking the HyperTalk/MetaTalk idiom and making it run identically across the major desktop operating systems, Revolution kept the xTalk philosophy of approachable, English-like, event-driven programming alive at a time when that tradition might otherwise have faded with HyperCard’s discontinuation. Its later evolution into LiveCode is a rare example of a 1990s engine and an even older language family being successfully carried, intact in spirit, into the era of mobile apps.