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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

> I loved VB6. Of all the languages and IDE's I've ever used, I've never been more efficient in any other one.

Other than the amount of work it would take, what's to keep someone from taking all of the specs and docs, and implementing a language compatible with VB6 and VB.NET?

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VB6 and VB.NET are barely related.

But, ignoring that, almost any app of any complexity in VB6 land will rely on bugs, quirks, and implementation details. (Also, I was never clear if the binary format for editing forms was actually documented somewhere). Someone could implement their own VB6 parser, but it seems like a ton of work for a vanishing market.

All of that said, while typing this, a quick search revealed https://www.radbasic.dev/ , so maybe someone's trying. Well, it's a Kickstarter, so maybe someone just has an idea. Dunno.

>> but it seems like a ton of work for a vanishing market.

That market isn't going anywhere anytime soon, though.

There are a lot of XP machines out there running critical VB code...

You can run VB6 on Windows Server 2019. I should know, it’s in production right now

My final year project was a VB6 -> JVM compiler. I underestimated how big VB6 actually was and so only had time to implement a small fraction of the language. I did discover a bug in the IDE's code completion/formatter that would cause a compilation failure when the project was next loaded. That code is on a floppy somewhere

Nothing, it is just that nobody bothered. There have been a bunch of classic-VB-like languages (even IBM made one with their 'Visual Age for Basic' - though they really missed the mark on the IDE side, but the language and features were very VB6-like), but pretty much all of them either get abandoned or miss the entire point of classic VB by focusing on one thing (usually the language) while ignoring another (usually the IDE or sometimes the fact that classic VB is almost a 'live' system and instead they put a clear C-like separation between editing and compilation)... or miss completely by doing all these things wrong. Assuming they do not die off before managing to make anything usable, of course.

For one thing, there was no VB6 language spec, and the docs were rather informal when it comes to syntax definition (which is very non-trivial - all the "special" functions etc).

Xojo (formerly Real Basic) is an attempt at a cross platform version of VB.

https://www.xojo.com/index_xojo.php

Not open source but it looks quite interesting.

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