It became a major part of the software stack for Motorola's varied lines of microcontrollers, and eventually led to them purchasing Metrowerks in 1999.

Rich Siegel, author of BBEdit, heard that McEnerney had left Symantec and told Greg Galanos of Metrowerks in Montreal.

[3] Metrowerks had already developed Pascal and Modula-II compilers, originally for the Atari ST, but later ported to a number of contemporary machines including the Mac.

Typical compilers of the era would repeatedly examine their intermediate representation (IR) producing more and more optimized versions of the code until they finally converted it to machine instructions.

On a machine that relied on register use for performance, which is one of the primary concepts of RISC processors, this technique can lead to huge improvements.

At the time, the main IDE and compiler toolchain was still running on the 68k machines, producing PPC binaries that were then moved to the prototype and debugged.

Running natively on the PPC, and based on code dedicated to the platform, CodeWarrior offered dramatically higher performance, while allowing one to develop and debug on a single machine.

Symantec, who had owned the Mac development market since 1986, did not release a native PPC version until late March 1995.

After Metrowerks was acquired by Motorola in 1999, the company concentrated on embedded applications, devoting a smaller fraction of their efforts to compilers for desktop computers.

Metrowerks indicated that revenue share of the product fell from 22% to 5% in the last four years and the effort by the company to concentrate on the embedded development market.

The demand for CodeWarrior had presumably fallen during the time Apple began distributing Xcode (its own software development kit for OS X) for free.

[citation needed] During its heyday, the product was known for its rapid release cycle, with multiple revisions every year, and for its quirky advertising campaign.

CodeWarrior CD packaging was very much in the tradition of the Apple developer CDs, featuring slogans such as "Blood, Sweat, and Code" and "Veni, Vidi, Codi" in prominent lettering.

Latitude had previously been used successfully by Adobe to port Photoshop and Premiere to Silicon Graphics and Solaris workstations.

Latitude DR2 was released on Oct 27, 1997 and won an Eddy Award at the 1998 Macworld for Best Tool for New Technologies beating out Joy from AAA+ Software F&E and Visual Cafe for Macintosh 1.0.2 by Symantec.

[27] At the time, Steve Jobs was heavily promoting the OPENSTEP API (renamed Yellow Box) in order to access the new features of the operating system.

For C/C++/Pascal Macintosh developers, this presented a substantial hurdle because it was markedly different from the classic MacOS API that ran inside Blue Box and was Objective-C based.

Latitude was for a short time coined as the "Green Box"[28] for obvious reasons and appeared to be another hit for Metrowerks and further solidify its dominance in the Macintosh developer tools market but Apple secretly had plans of its own.

Apple's announcement of its forthcoming Carbon API (codenamed "Ivory Tower") to appeal to developers who required a practical way to transition to the new operating system eliminated the need for any third-party solutions.

[29] Metrowerks used Latitude internally to port CodeWarrior to run on Red Hat and SuSE Linux for commercial sale and additionally to Solaris under contract from Sun Microsystems.