free Basic - just curious?

[codeWrapped]

So I am new to free Basic and just wondering what the attraction is for others here?

Also wondering if free Basic is actually being used professionally for building applications?

Thanks!

[hhr]

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[BasicCoder2]

BASIC was my first language on my first computer the TRS80. The attraction I had for FreeBASIC 12 years ago was as a hobby programmer. FreeBASIC was easier to use and read than the C++ I had been using up to then and compiled to fast readable code and also came with innate graphics statements relevant to my interests. The clincher was expert programmers well versed in C++ who provided code that enabled me to do everything in FreeBASIC that I required for my projects.

What attracted you to try out FreeBASIC? Do you program in other languages?

[dafhi]

these questions are fun. my memory seems to be fleeing xD .. TRS80 .. ugh, for the life of me i can't remember what that looked like

my first language which i attempted was on a timex sinclair .. maybe that's the TRS80? haha .. anyway i specifically remember as a kid typing stuff in that looked like code, and it did something but i didn't understand WHY, yet. only tried that once. in elementary school they showed LOGO (which, researching just now is a dialect of LISP), us kids made stuff with that on APPLE II.

APPLE II GS blew us away. i don't remember programming anything in JR. High (age 10-13)
in high school i took basic and advanced basic, also on Apples. i saw quicksort for the firs time, completely didn't understand it.

attempted c++ in college around 1995. i never really did the assignments, teach gave me an F, which, looking back, made him awesome. but i had a bad opinion of c++ for a few decades b/c of that (and its syntax looks like a pile of wires.)

took an intro Visual Basic course around late 1998.
VB became obsolete 'quickly', i eventually found freebasic.

i learned some c++ b/c of "Ray Tracing in One Weekend" around 2021
you hear about c++ being fast .. it's true

[codeWrapped]

BASIC was my first language on my first computer the TRS80. The attraction I had for FreeBASIC 12 years ago was as a hobby programmer. FreeBASIC was easier to use and read than the C++ I had been using up to then and compiled to fast readable code and also came with innate graphics statements relevant to my interests. The clincher was expert programmers well versed in C++ who provided code that enabled me to do everything in FreeBASIC that I required for my projects.

What attracted you to try out FreeBASIC? Do you program in other languages?

I have been programming a long time, started out with Basic on a Commodore V-20. I was hooked as soon as I hit the enter key and the computer displayed "Hello Kevin" on the screen. Even though I had just keyed in the one liner program from the very sparse manual, it was like magic!

I have mostly programmed in PHP and JavaScript professionally, but dabble in other languages for fun.

I am currently focused on game programming and recently was trying out Rust. Now there is nothing wrong with that language and in fact I believe it to be very powerful. However while starting to learn it I remembered something? The more complex something is, the harder it is to use. It got me thinking about all the different languages there are and what my actual goal is. Which is to produce a native game on a PC and keep my tools and process as simple as possible. Then I had the thought, I wonder how Basic would compare to Rust being completely on the other end of the spectrum and so here I am!

Two days in and I am really liking free Basic so far! I was surprised to find a Basic still fairly active and even more surprised to find out free Basic is typed, which is awesome.

[codeWrapped]

these questions are fun. my memory seems to be fleeing xD .. TRS80 .. ugh, for the life of me i can't remember what that looked like

my first language which i attempted was on a timex sinclair .. maybe that's the TRS80? haha .. anyway i specifically remember as a kid typing stuff in that looked like code, and it did something but i didn't understand WHY, yet. only tried that once. in elementary school they showed LOGO (which, researching just now is a dialect of LISP), us kids made stuff with that on APPLE II.

APPLE II GS blew us away. i don't remember programming anything in JR. High (age 10-13)
in high school i took basic and advanced basic, also on Apples. i saw quicksort for the firs time, completely didn't understand it.

attempted c++ in college around 1995. i never really did the assignments, teach gave me an F, which, looking back, made him awesome. but i had a bad opinion of c++ for a few decades b/c of that (and its syntax looks like a pile of wires.)

took an intro Visual Basic course around late 1998.
VB became obsolete 'quickly', i eventually found freebasic.

i learned some c++ b/c of "Ray Tracing in One Weekend" around 2021
you hear about c++ being fast .. it's true

Yes I think these questions are fun. I didn't know how it would be received, but I asked because I was really curious? I know I have a definite goal and if free Basic fits the bill, than I am all in!

[BasicCoder2]

@codeWrapped

If wanting to write computer games is your goal you might want to consider what kind of games you want to write and on what platforms you want them to run when selecting a computer language. In the early years of FreeBASIC there were many games written but it has all but died out now.
https://games.freebasic.net/

[codeWrapped]

So are you saying freeBasic is actually dead?

[Lothar Schirm]

I would not say that FreeBasic is actually dead, but the forum has calmed down. I think the reason may be that a lot of work has been done up to now so that FreeBasic has reached a rather stable state, including the support of many external libraries. Many forum members presented their own projects and ideas to support using FreeBasic (e.g. IDEs or self-written GUI examples and libraries). So I think nearly everything that is possible has been discussed in this forum, and it is not easy to find new issues of general interest. But there are still people who have questions or post interesting codes, and I think it is possible to have a lot of fun with FreeBasic, at least for hobby programmers (I do not believe that FreeBasic is used widely by professional programmers). I began with QuickBASIC 4.5 and some years later used Turbo Pascal 6.0, which I used both at work and as a hobby programmer at home. More than ten years ago I tried PureBasic, but I was a little bit frustrated of its strange syntax. So I came back to the roots: FreeBasic as the modern successor of QuickBasic.

[deltarho[1859]]

Also wondering if free Basic is actually being used professionally for building applications?

To answer your question, which nobody has yet, I very much doubt that to be true.

About twenty years ago, I wrote if ever I published an application I would charge whatever I thought that I could get away with unless it was security-based, in which case it would be free. In 2018, I published a security-based application and it is freeware.

If I were a professional programmer, would I use FreeBASIC? No, it is a hobbyist language and never intended to be anything else. As a hobbyist language, it is, in my opinion, one of the very best.

There are some outstanding graphics coders on this forum, so if you want to “produce a native game on a PC” you have landed at the right place.

[Imortis]

There are a few commercial applications being made in FB:
http://godsandidols.com/
That game is one. There is another game on steam called "Toad on Fire".

I also know there were a couple of apps made in FB many years ago.

There are some but not many.

[Makoto WATANABE]

i learned some c++ b/c of "Ray Tracing in One Weekend" around 2021

I was able to enjoy this in my Windows 10 environment.
https://github.com/dafhi/Ray-Tracing-in ... -FreeBASIC
Although the action is a little slow.

[codeWrapped]

OK, thank you Lothar Schirm and deltarho[1859] for your replies. They were very insightful and about what I was expecting.

I love how friendly this community is.

I would say free Basic is one of the best BASIC dialects I have tried

[deltarho[1859]]

@codeWrapped

Develop using gas/gas64; compilations are much faster than gcc32/gcc64.

If you limit the frames per second to 60 you may find there is no need for gcc. If you need to squeeze more out of your CPU, then up the ante to gcc; it can be remarkable what a C-optimizing compiler can do.

With fbc 1.20.0, no release version yet, we now have gcc/clang and that is showing some promise in certain areas.

We are ruined for choice.

[dafhi]

@Makoto - you can try -gen gcc -arch native -Wc -Ofast,-mfpmath=sse,-funroll-loops

thanks for checking it out!