Is FreeBasic still continued to develop?

General discussion for topics related to the FreeBASIC project or its community.
Post Reply
marcov
Posts: 3455
Joined: Jun 16, 2005 9:45
Location: Netherlands
Contact:

Post by marcov »

Galeon wrote:A lot of people are confused with the date of the last release. An open source software without a release for more than a year seems to be dead. When I have downloaded FB, I thought it was already dead until I joined the forum.
I think the developers should give a release, like 0.20.1 or 0.21.0, even though there are not a lot of changes but bug fixes.
Hmm, an year gap is not that strange IMHO, since many small and mid-level projects lack the resources to manage multiple branches efficiently.

So often before major releases (e.g. rewrites or the like) big gaps happen, and there is no maintainable branch to release from.

FPC had such problems too with the old 1.0.x codegenerator, which had an optimizer that was very painful to stabilize after a couple of fixes. IIRC the gap between 1.0.10 and 2.0 was over 1 1/2 year. (and 1.0 and 2.0 branch separated in januari 2000, so even 1.0.10 was only a pointrelease)
TheMG
Posts: 376
Joined: Feb 08, 2006 16:58

Post by TheMG »

Well, a year gap would be fine if there was progress, even if only in a branch.
lemontree
Posts: 21
Joined: Apr 12, 2008 14:37
Location: Bac Ninh, Vietnam
Contact:

Post by lemontree »

I like FreeBasic and will continue to use it.
I had hoped it would become an easy to use object orientated language that would be ported to forthcoming intel Larrabee chip(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(GPU) ).
People get married, have kids and take on many duties and responsibilities in life. They can't keep developing code for free. And so open source projects can come to an end.
The only alternative for me is a complex mix of 4 programming languages: Java, Processing (http://www.processing.org/), C and x86 assembly language.
It is really a mess to have to switch between so many programming languages and get them to operate together, but there you go.
Landeel
Posts: 777
Joined: Jan 25, 2007 10:32
Location: Brazil
Contact:

Post by Landeel »

Date Summary
2010-01-14 Commit by v1ctor :: r5288 /branches/v0_21-gengcc/ (TODO.txt ast-node- {...}
2010-01-14 Commit by v1ctor :: r5287 /branches/v0_21-gengcc/ (5 files in 2 dirs) {...}
2010-01-14 Commit by v1ctor :: r5286 /branches/v0_21-gengcc/ (4 files): (link) {...}
2010-01-14 Commit by v1ctor :: r5285 /branches/v0_21-gengcc/ (7 files in 2 dirs) {...}
2010-01-14 Commit by v1ctor :: r5284 /branches/v0_21-gengcc/ (5 files): (link) {...}
Does that mean yes? :)
McLovin
Posts: 82
Joined: Oct 21, 2008 1:15
Contact:

Post by McLovin »

I hope so!!!
srvaldez
Posts: 3373
Joined: Sep 25, 2005 21:54

Post by srvaldez »

wow, v1ctor has been busy :)
Schrubber
Posts: 50
Joined: Dec 07, 2009 11:09

Is FreeBasic still continued to develop?

Post by Schrubber »

indeed! :)
aurelVZAB
Posts: 666
Joined: Jul 02, 2008 14:55
Contact:

Post by aurelVZAB »

From my point of view i dont understand people who need continued
development?
I only wish that FreeBasic be without bugs ( by the way i dont discover
something problematic).I dont use Free Basic constantly but from time to
time and i can say that work fine.
By the way if someone is not satisfied with current state why dont simply
switch to something else.
aurelVZAB
Posts: 666
Joined: Jul 02, 2008 14:55
Contact:

Post by aurelVZAB »

Oh i forget i have question for Scraubber.
You are author of new editor for FB is'nt?
And editor looks really great.
But what is the main reason that you write them in C++ instead of
FreeBasic?
I mean if you have enough knowlege for programming in FreeBasic
what is advantage of using C++,explain it little bit more if is no
problem.
Why i told you that?
Simple if you made good IDE in FreeBasic for FreeBasic you
automaticly send good message to other people that made yours
programs in FreeBasic to.

all best
Aurel
Landeel
Posts: 777
Joined: Jan 25, 2007 10:32
Location: Brazil
Contact:

Post by Landeel »

From my point of view i dont understand people who need continued
development?
The C emitter is the best thing that could happen for FreeBASIC. It will make it much easier to port FreeBASIC to many new platforms, like Linux X86_64, ARM, Mac, game consoles...
fsw
Posts: 260
Joined: May 27, 2005 6:02

Post by fsw »

aurelVZAB wrote:From my point of view i dont understand people who need continued development?
Well... with such a point of view EmergenceBasic or CreativeBasic are right on; the developer just ceased the development of these products ;)

This is the whole point of using open source compilers - they live on even if the company ceases the development.
fsw
Posts: 260
Joined: May 27, 2005 6:02

Post by fsw »

@Victor
thank you for taking the time to improve FB with a C emitter.
v1ctor
Site Admin
Posts: 3804
Joined: May 27, 2005 8:08
Location: SP / Bra[s]il
Contact:

Post by v1ctor »

Thanks. There were (and still are) many fix to be done in the gcc emitter, but it will allow FB to be ported to new platforms in the future (say x86-64, ARM), keeping it alive for much longer (don't let BASIC die!). Besides the gain with optimizations; in my tests, the gfx demos ran at least 2 times faster with "-O max"; i guess it'll be the same with the math intensive apps.

It's pretty functional already, but i still need to fix a couple of ICE's and test it against the test suite, plus rebuilding fbc completely using the emitter.
duke4e
Posts: 717
Joined: Dec 04, 2005 0:16
Location: Varazdin, Croatia, Europe
Contact:

Post by duke4e »

Nice to see you here! Can't wait to try GCC emitter!
fsw
Posts: 260
Joined: May 27, 2005 6:02

Post by fsw »

I see changes/fixes in svn in the gcc branch and the trunk.

Cool :))
Post Reply