Currently inactive

[counting_pine]

It's been great having you working on this project, dkl, and I've enjoyed occasionally being able to work together on things. You've brought FreeBASIC a long way.

Neither of us have the level of activity we once had. I think we have both had ideas, or vague hopes/intentions to do things, and never got round to them..

Perhaps the best thing now is to open FreeBASIC to the community as much as possible.
We should make it possible for other people to be able to build the compiler themselves, and to make releases.

I think for many Linux distributions, we can put together a script that will put together a build environment, and perhaps even download the latest code, and make, test and package it all in one go.

For Windows, probably quite a bit harder, and I don't know about DOS.. (I know in Powershell it's at least possible to automate the downloading of necessary files..)

If anyone does want to start developing on FB, then I'm sure guidance will still be available at times from me and others, or maybe working together you can work out what the code's doing and how to change it.
Potentially we could also make a community development forum available, if people want to exchange ideas.

[srvaldez]

thank you dkl for all the work on FB and for taking the time to answer my questions. :-)
@counting_pine , I use msys2 to build FB on windows with no problems, just run make.
the only problem I had was building the 32-bit version, even though I was using the 32-bit shell the FB makefile would build for 64-bit but St_W provided a patch and now it builds ok.

[anonymous1337]

Hm, I was wondering why the next version was taking so long to come out...

[Provoni]

Thanks for all your work dkl. Keep the BASIC dream alife!

[Tourist Trap]

Whatever is decided now, FB is still very capable at this point. And thanks to dkl the things have evolved very smartly, very logically, in the right way.

So even if dkl can not work actively anymore on the code, I hope he could at least stay in the leading team to make some decisions. I'm sure that everyone agrees here that the developpment until now was on the right path, and the work on the code leaded to full satisfaction of everyone. FB still needs people that does naturally good decisions. Even slower it should continue as it, I hope so anyway. Thanks again.

[Lachie Dazdarian]

Thanks for all your effort so far. It was invaluable.

I'm saddened FB didn't have the trajectory we all wished for, but a temporary slump might not be permanent.

The future will show.

I'm only a seldom user, so I cannot help at all in compiler development issues.

Good luck to all developers in times to come.

[TeeEmCee]

We should make it possible for other people to be able to build the compiler themselves, and to make releases.

I never realised that there is now a bootstrap version of the source code available for download, so FB can now be compiled easily. It would be nice if FB packages were included in more OSes and package collections such as Linux distributions, BSD port trees, MacPorts, etc. Arch Linux has a FB package but most don't. There seems to be one for Ubuntu, but it's in an obscure package collection.

This is something community members need to volunteer for and maintain, and it'll be hugely helpful for those of us trying to distribute FLOSS FB programs. I'll try to get around to creating packages for Slackware and maybe FreeBSD.

[v1ctor]

Best decision the team had, years ago, was inviting dkl to join the project!

For our luck he accepted to be part of the team :). FB was improved in so many ways... The project could be dead by now without his (and counting_pine) efforts in the last years.

Thanks for keeping FB alive! I know how hard is it to keep the motivation to work on a compiler over the years. My motivation comes and goes, but it's never as high as in the beginning of the project, back in 2004 (FB is still far from a 20 years project :P).

Good luck in your new projects. It won't be easy to find a new team member with your knowledge, talent and dedication..

[Lost Zergling]

I fell sad you leave, maybe I understand the reasons you mention, hard to accept it. I'm sure everyone will seek to compensate for your departure, its own way. With all my respect. Yours Zerglingly.

[bihai]

Sad to hear that after long time waiting.
Thanks for the great works, FreeBASIC team.
FreeBASIC has been good, yet lacks supports for modern mobile systems.
Look forward to new progress.

[sean_vn]

FB is kind of too big with too many things in it. A reduced complexity Basic with more graphic commands would be good.

I would nearly switch to Amulet except that it has 1 based arrays and a lack of some numeric things I need.
http://www.amulet.xyz/

There is also a compiled version of Ruby called Crystal that looks nice:
https://blog.codeship.com/an-introducti ... k-as-ruby/
I had trouble installing that on my system though.

Using Java in a low level way is also an option, even just using it with the AWT for maximum simplicity. However I had trouble with the reliability of mouse events which dissuaded me.

Then there is a version of Java called Processing: https://processing.org/
Or my daughter was using Alice 3: https://www.alice.org/

I kinda liked Basic4GL: https://www.basic4gl.net/

[oyster]

@sean_vn
Crystal does not support windows currently. Since I use Python most, I am learing nim( http://nim-lang.org/) now, which is a Python-syntax-like, compiled-to-C language and runs on Windows/Linux/Mac. Or we can say 'fast as C, slick as Python' ;)

Python and nim can let user type few words than C/BASIC/JAVA.
As for python, C/FB can be used to create DLL, or C can be used to make extension, so the speed is acceptable, but there is still some room for improvement.
Further mor, Python has a very good ecosystem, so we can find almost every libs. For FB/nim, we can use C libs, but it takes some time for wrapping if there is no existing wrapping already.

[sean_vn]

I think Processing is the alternative that is most FB like. I'll take a look at Nim.
What would interest me most is a version of Basic that was orientated toward low level programming while still having reasonable graphics and some kind of easy to use GUI.

[TeeEmCee]

FB is kind of too big with too many things in it. A reduced complexity Basic with more graphic commands would be good.

I don't want to start a language war in this thread; all of the other languages you mentioned are probably very nice and I'm a fan of some of them, but Python, Ruby, Java, Processing and Nim are all huge languages compared to FB. FB is very lean and sits not far above C. It sounds like you actually want a language with more (builtin graphics and high-level features), not less.

FreeBASIC has been good, yet lacks supports for modern mobile systems.

The core of FB (compiler and rtlib) is pretty portable to any modern platform, including ARM, x86_64, BSD, OSX, Android, HTML5/Emscripten and probably iOS (I don't think anyone has tried iOS?), however its graphics library, fbgfx, is not. We need a backend for fbgfx which uses a portable library like SDL2 or Allegro 5. Trimbor started writing an SDL2 backend and v1ctor created an SDL 1.2 backend for the Emscripten port, but someone else needs to continue this work. Then FB will truly be portable!

For FB/nim, we can use C libs, but it takes some time for wrapping if there is no existing wrapping already.

Use fbfrog to create the header files; it's an awesome piece of software. Written by dkl, naturally :)

[counting_pine]

What's the status of the SDL/Emscripten branch? Has anyone tried it on Linux/Windows?