CodeWarrior is an integrated development environment for the Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and embedded systems that is developed and marketed by Freescale Semiconductor. Specialized versions for the Sony PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube, Nintendo DS, Palm OS, and Symbian OS also exist, and there was even a version for BeOS. C and C++ compilers are the focus of the tools, though versions of CodeWarrior have included Objective-C, Java or Pascal compilers as well. Metrowerks originally developed CodeWarrior. The first versions of CodeWarrior targeted the Macintosh, with much of the development done by a group from the original THINK C team. Much like THINK C, which was known for its fast compile times, CodeWarrior was faster than Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, the development tools written by Apple, and as of August 2005 is still faster than Apple's gcc based Xcode development tools. CodeWarrior was a key factor in the success of Apple's transition of its machine architecture from Motorola 68K processors to PowerPC because it provided a complete, solid PowerPC compiler when the competition (Apple's MPW tools and Symantec C++) was mostly incomplete. Metrowerks also made it easy to generate fat binaries which included both 68K and PowerPC code. However, after Metrowerks was acquired by Motorola in 1999, the company concentrated on embedded applications, devoting a smaller fraction of their efforts into compilers for desktop computers. On July 29, 2005, they announced that CodeWarrior for Mac would be discontinued after the next release, CodeWarrior Pro 10. Although Metrowerks did not detail their reasons, the demand for CodeWarrior had presumably fallen after Apple began distributing a free IDE with Mac OS X. In addition, Apple's switch to Intel chips left Metrowerks without an obvious product as they had sold their Intel compiler technology to Nokia earlier in 2005. During its heyday, the product was known for its rapid release cycle, with multiple revisions every year, and for its quirky advertising campaign. Their "geekware" shirts were featured in the fashion pages of the New York Times.[1]
Origin of the name
During the 1990s, Apple Computer released a monthly series of developer CD-ROMs containing resources for programming the Macintosh. These CDs were, in the early days, whimsically titled using punning references to various movies but with a coding twist; for example, "The Hexorcist" (The Exorcist), "Lord of the Files" (Lord of the Flies), "Gorillas in the Disc" (Gorillas in the Mist), etc.[1]. One of these, volume 9, was titled "Code Warrior", referring to the movie Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Later Apple dropped the whimsical titling in favour of a more sober "Developer CD series", but Metrowerks picked up the CodeWarrior theme and used the name for their new developer product. CodeWarrior CD packaging was very much in the tradition of the Apple developer CDs, featuring slogans such as "Blood, Sweat and Code" in prominent lettering. Competing products such as Symantec's THINK C were more conventionally marketed.
References
- ^ "FRONTIERS OF MARKETING; Selling Geek Chic," New York Times, February 12, 1995
