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Is there a Visual Basic that compiles for all platforms? Man that would be a killer app. As a teen, I hadn't even formally learned BASIC, but somehow I was able to cobble together programs with VB, and it gave me confidence that I could learn more.

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There really is a huge gap left behind by the decline of VB. I've been designing a few games with Godot recently and I've really come to enjoy how intuitive it is for building interfaces and getting prototypes up and running. However the proprietary scripting language (GDScript) itself is rather limited. Having a solid WYSIWYG form builder backed by e.g. Python that generates binaries for a number of target platforms would be incredible.

I may be in the minority but I really enjoy proper desktop software over SaaS web equivalents.

Lazarus might serve the purpose, its based on Pascal, which in most respects a better system than VB.

The closest you get to having a RAD IDE for WinForms is probably Lazarus, but it's based on Pascal. For BASIC, there's a project called WinFBE which seems to be in active development.

Lazarus is a good call. There's also Winforms 2.0 support in mono, which gives you all major platforms via .NET. You can even use VB.NET with it.

I'd argue that QtCreator is a contender here as well. The forms/widget editor is quite powerful.

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