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[mnrvovrfc]

If not QB64, I'd rather have Freebasic than ancient M$VB.

This M$.. always reminds me of the old days in the @Heise forum; more than 20 years ago. This was a real battle zone!

Linux and Maccis against Windows. Windows and Maccis against Linux. Linux and Windows against Maccis. A System World War. At the time, I thought it was good. Warhammer out and on it. One could really relax mentally after university. 

The thing is that when I was able to use Visual Basic I was like LOL, what's the big deal? Because I discovered a BASIC interpreter bundled with OpenOffice.org v2 but couldn't go very far with it because the documentation was online and I couldn't have access at the time. When I was able to have Internet for the first time, I just didn't care about M$'s language products any longer. I downloaded Visual Studio Express but couldn't compile successfully the "Hello world" program that they provided, it was sick. Also I needed to get M$DN to be able to install Sony ACID Pro v6.0 on my computer. The next time I got a chance to use Visual Basic again was a few months ago when I made the great mistake of wasting 13GB of disk space on Visual Studio 2022. I only wanted to check out Terra (not by M$) out of it!

Visual Basic? Thanks but no thanks. Freebasic? Yeah maybe, once in a while when I'm bored and I don't have to play music from it. The way QB64 developed very fast from the "dot-rip" and now Phoenix Edition made me quite ignorant I think.

[madscijr]

I think we all have different strengths and interests. If you are into stuff like ReactOS and Linux and C, that's great. That ain't my wheelhouse, not even close! QB64 is closer to VB6 than the stuff you're into, at least for me. I loved VB6, and love VBA, and find C, C++ and .NET painful. You are way more advanced than I will ever be, hats off to you!

Sometimes you read my posts too closely. I was jiving a bit.

Ah! Well you know how touchy we get over our tools and programming langauges! If you insult someone's platform, it can be like insulting their mother! LOL

But I don't understand why you want to run VB6, when it was put down for a reason.

It was put down for a few reasons, but maybe not good reasons for people who were productive with and enjoyed VB6:

• Licenses!!! Microsoft's business model means they have to continually sell new software, so they deprecate the old.
  
• Managed code and 100% object-oriented seen as better for enterprise development. OO is not perfect, for many jobs it is more complicated, and has overhead.
  
• Microsoft can't support everything, they update their tools and people go along with it to get support and be current / compatible. 
  
• Valid improvements to the language = doesn't mean the old language is "broken", people like modern features but also, they need something new to sell, so new features = new product = more revenue for Microsoft. But if "newer is better" is a reason to retire classic VB, then why are we here playing with QuickBasic? Sometimes the old way works fine and is better for certain people.
  

Not necessarily for something better for many of us.

You got that right, lol. I did VB.NET with framework 1.1, and it was okay. But all my code and learning how to do things in VB6 (and before that QuickBasic) no longer worked. Lots of time and energy spent to redo everything that worked fine before, and then spend $ to buy new tools, etc. 

VB.NET 1.1 still let you do some procedural code, but with each version they moved to pure OO, and the language changed and didn't always stay backwards-compatible. More work! Also, MS started leaving features out of VB.NET that were in C#, and things that used to be done for you in VB you now had to do manually. I don't recall specific examples, I remember thinking "really??? this used to be so easy!"

But I don't understand why you want to run VB6

Also, let me clarify that when I say VB6, I am talking about 2 different things - the language and the IDE.

VB langauge
The language is not the newest with the most advanced features (then again neither is QuickBasic!)
But the language worked. Things I like about the VB6 (and VBA) language:

• Easy! If you know it, you don't have to learn a ton of new stuff. It doesn't change every year like .NET, and old code still works.
  
• Tons of existing documentation still online for VB6.
  
• You can do OO but don't have to, you can stick with procedural code if you want. Options!
  
• The language itself is just an easy syntax and it works. Same reason we have and like QB64!
  
• In VB6 you can reference OO COM DLLs from other Windows applications, and use them in your own code. QB64 doesn't have OO so you need an OO langauge to use those features.
  

VB IDE
The IDE is just the tool to build your applications. Things I liked about the VB6 IDE:

• Easy to set up - you just install it and it works. You can configure it, but you don't have to, it works right out of the box.
  
• Built in form builder. Drag and drop basic GUI elements onto the screen. Drag the elements and screen to resize them. Double-click an element to edit its codebehind. All WYSIWYG.
  
• Simple to use. Not perfect, but good enough, and easy. Same as QB64's IDE - not perfect, but it works and is good enough. If QB64's IDE is good enough, so is VB6's.
  
• Compiles to a native EXE (not intermediate language!)
  

There were things I don't like about VB6:

• The GUI design is saved as binary data - it would be better if it was in some human-readable format that can be edited in notepad if you want (similar to HTML forms, etc.)
  
• No option to compile to a single standalone EXE file (where DLLs and other dependencies are rolled into the EXE).
  
• Probably missing a bunch of features that IDEs got in the 20+ years since VB6 (although sometimes too many features make things too complicated!)
  

But if you want to use it again only to run a couple of programs, and very desperate to run that sine-wave/square-wave oscillator demo, which does only one thing, cannot play MIDI, cannot record what it produces, cannot do anything else with the sound etc...

Not just a couple of programs! Hundreds! Thousands!
I have hundreds of my own VB6 programs and libraries, thousands of lines of code, and thousands of other applications that do many many different things.

I'm not into C as deeply as you might think. I used to be, in the 1990's because I decided to waste time that way. Did nothing very useful except replicate somebody else's windows for application programming in text mode, ie. looking like M$QB editor. I wanted to go much further than I did with Turbo Pascal v5.5. By the time I discovered QB64 I rarely did anything in C or C++. However I was put off so much by the bugginess of the SDL versions of QB64 that I kept using M$QB45 because I was allowed to do so on a laptop running Windows7. At the time, I did a lot of stuff just processing text files. Nothing with music and images. If it had to do with music it was fabricating a REAPER project file, creating an XML file (combined with ZIP-creation utility) toward some other music application so it could load instruments, samples and sound effect definitions and that sort of thing. Eventually that computer's HDD crashed and I was forced to use Ubuntu Studio 32-bit which left me only with Lua. No problem, I was still able to do that XML thing for a while longer. Didn't care about speed of doing things until I got fancy and got to loading, fabricating and saving one-channel wave files, discovering how fantastic Lua's tables are. Never needed C or C++ for any of that stuff. I programmed in Purebasic for about a year and the only thing it was able to do better than QB64 in my opinion was looking like other Windows applications with the GUI's, menus, dialog boxes, mouse handling etc. Doing stuff with images and music, well, it was a matter of time before QB64 grew functions that satisfied me enough instead of complicating my life further.

Interesting story! You have experience with many different languages. 
I liked Pascal back in school, it was a little wordy, but easier to work with than C, and compiled to fast machine code. 
I haven't tried PureBasic, any good? 
So let me ask you, if you like QB 4.5, what do you have against VB6? 
Because if you are into new features and "modern" programming, QuickBasic is even less advanced than classic VB! 
Why one and not the other? There is no right or wrong answer, I am just curious.

As usual TL;DR. Pass me the orange juice, I don't drink alcoholic beverages. :tu:

Ha! Cheers!

[mnrvovrfc]

You're forgetting that we're here into QB64, not "QuickBasic".

I stopped caring about "new features" and which compiler or language "product" might be better than the other. This became the same with music software for me this year. Now I choose the tool which is most convenient for the thing I want to do.

If I need to rename a large number of files, because some dumb-ass program does what it wants creating little chunks out of a big file, then I write something in Lua. If I need to fabricate a wave file quickly, same thing because I created a Lua module for it. If I needed to do that faster, I'd take up QB64 with some grumbling. Alternatively Freebasic if I wanted to muck around with pointers that looked anyhow like C++. If I ever really desired to build up the whole thing into a Windows GUI, then for the first time in about five years...

I don't care about M$ language products anymore, or anybody else's. I wanted to check out Xojo like I have said earlier but was put off by one more company expecting me to pay before I could get any comfort out of it. I'm still getting their e-mail as if I paid for a subscription, but I'm broke. Just forget about that, I don't care anymore if QB64 has ancient syntax, if Freebasic doesn't go far enough compared to Visual Basic or whatever. Just give me something that works and isn't complicated so I could do my program and the very limited thing I asked my program to do.

One of the reasons I took up QB64 was that I became impressed with Galleon's skill and determination, based on a lot of people adopting QuickBasic or QBasic for games and other things. Somebody else could have done the same thing (BaCon for instance) but with graphics and sound far beyond "DRAW" and "PLAY"? Heck yeah. (The Internet stuff also which BaCon could do as well.) If I were a "QuickBasic" fanboy or alike I would have never signed up for this forum, and I would have never taken QB64 or anything else seriously beyond M$QB v4.5 and Turbo Pascal v5.5. Probably my conception of Linux would have been different enough to care only about DOSBOX then or anything else that could run successfully those two MS-DOS applications.

[aurel]

Heh BaCon...
i liked syntax and let say good points of HUG (GTK wrapper) but is still
slow in execution , much slower than QB64 and FreeBasic..

QB64 have only one ugly feature..it is slow in compilation
when FreeBasic and OxygenBasic can compile 5000 lines of code in less than second
and
well i like Windows but really never liked VB6 ..i hate VB.net
VB6 was at time solid in many programming but not now
MSsmallBasic is a toy ....
Xojo..puff thank ..but no.

[aurel]

WOW for a vhGrid

The uber~grid..
Skinnable headers/scrollbars/checkboxes, integrated treeview, 16 integrated api edit controls, virtual mode, unbound data mode, 32b alpha icon support, sizeable header height, ole drag and drop, full unicode support, column filters, subcell controls, cell tooltips, column tips, custom cursors, ownerdrawn cells..
Hundreds of functions and properties, 27 thousand lines of code..

[mnrvovrfc]

QB64 have only one ugly feature..it is slow in compilation
when FreeBasic and OxygenBasic can compile 5000 lines of code in less than second
:

Well, QB64 inherits from C++ which is notoriously slow compiling because of all the syntax rules and other stuff inherited from C such as having to catch multiple errors in one pass. Not like Turbo Pascal which was designed to complain at the first thing it disliked LOL.

In addition, QB64 has to create a bunch of code snippets and helper text files and figure out how to put it all together into command lines for "g++", "ld" and programs like that. Recently I discovered "DATA" statements are enrolled into a text file which is parsed by this certain program, now forgot what it's called, and that program produces a file with extension "dot-o" which then gets linked along with the QB64 source code and libraries.

One thing to add is that QB64 allows a programmer to never declare variables before using them, could always do a$, i&, bigu&&, point%& and stuff like that and must be done while defining a "FUNCTION" anyway. Freebasic forces the programmer to declare variables without exception which could contribute to its better speed. But how about if those 5k lines had nothing to do with OOP? If the preprocessor (more complex than that of QB64, eg. supports macros) is included in the speed tests then the speed of Freebasic is impressive.