I'm sure there are still VB6 users out there that miss the old interface and ease of use. It seems that VB.NET became it's own variation of the language. I'm one of those nostalgic VB users but put it behind me when I made Linux my primary desktop. (story continues but side tracked for a moment)
I was trying to find a way to deal with Windows callbacks and defining structures from ScriptBasic for my API scripting project. Google pointed me to AutoIt which uses a DLL call to expose a AutoIt script function as a callback. They also have a DLL version of the language called AutoItX that exposes COM with other helper functions for scripting languages that may want to interface with it. For grins, I downloaded AutoIt for Windows and installed in under Linux /Wine. It seems to run just fine. This got me thinking ...
(Retuning back to my VB story) I had a portable version of VB6 that I thought I would try. I was surprised I was able to get to the IDE. I have VB6 as part of Visual Studio 6 but all the service packs that need to follow made it more of a project than I had time for. I still would like to see VB6 run well on Linux or maybe it's just me.
Useless in my opinion. Programs written in VB6 would be among the last I would install under Linux.
If you need a quick way to develop a desktop GUI application, there is gambas, very similar to VB.
I like Gambas a lot. Getting it install and working can be as difficult as VB. It's nice to see Ubuntu offering it as a installable application. I still have to start the IDE as root or many of the files show as READONLY.
The treeview example compiles to a 7.8 KB executable. (gambas runtime must be installed) The compiled application loads swiftly as if compiled in C.
ScriptBasic scripts don't compile to byte code either. It's PCODE with a interface wrapper to a shared object API/runtime. Both ScriptBasic and Gambas have much in common at the core language level.
Gambas is a Basic development environment supporting the Basic programming language with object extensions. It includes an IDE, a BASIC compiler, an interpreter, an archiver and a graphical user interface component. The archiver combines all the files in your project into a single executable file. Although not intended to be a Visual Basic clone, it has a visual rapid application development interface like VB. Supported operating systems include Linux and FreeBSD, OpenBSD.
ScriptBasic is an object based embeddable Basic API scripting engine.
I'm taking a different approach with ScriptBasic and extending it with scripting shared libraries and system APIs dynamically at runtime. SB is a good glue language when you just need to get the job done and not make a career out of it.
Richard wrote:@ JohnSpikowski.
Discussion of esoteric BASIC hybrids such as the ScriptBasic interpreter are irrelevant to this topic, they should remain on the ScriptBasic forum. This is the FreeBASIC forum, please try to keep to the topic. In future please avoid posting spam advertising your favourite products on this forum.
