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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

How is this better than actual VisualBasic?

VB6 IDE doesn't play nice with Windows 10 anymore - There's a few glitches that make it irritating.

On the upside msvbvm60.dll is still shipped with Windows 10 and 11, so a lot of VB6 apps will still just 'run'.

Yeah, the VB6 IDE stutters and crashes horribly on just about any Windows after XP and Microsoft support documents suggests to not run it on anything more recent. So that means VMs at this point and XP being out of support too that means VMs that are network isolated as best as possible.

Sure, the compiled apps still run fine, so at this point developer experience suffers a lot more compared to user experience and some users don't understand how much harder every day it is to work on VB6 codebases. (It's a bit of a horror hidden from users.)

The VB6 IDE predates a lot of modern code navigation tools.

The VB6 IDE predates common deployment of the mouse scroll wheel and scroll wheel support is provided by a cranky extension to the IDE that stutters awfully.

I repeat: Scroll wheel support is broken by default in VB6 and there's an extension you can find on the web to install (if you can malware scan it and get it across your network isolation boundary to your XP VM) and it's still awful. Imagine trying to read thousands of lines ancient code without scroll wheel support. Might as well be on papyrus scrolls.

The last version of git that supported XP is now pretty ancient and showing its age.

Good luck setting up an XP build agent for VB6 IDE CI. Which it never supported anyway (the IDE never had a good CLI build tool).

Developer experience of maintaining VB6 IDE apps in 2022 is pretty horrible and morale destroying.

How does the IDE run under Wine? It might have better support for 9x/XP quirks than even the strictest "compatibility modes" in later versions of Windows,

At this point it's maybe not worth the effort to find out. A related problem is that the IDE and most VB6 controls and apps are awful about littering all of their settings in the Registry (where it doesn't belong) or equally hard to find spots. Most of the VMs I've seen you can't even rebuild at this point: they were lifted and shifted from some distant past developer's machine and nobody anymore has the raw license codes or files to unlock the various third party components (and some of those component companies no longer exist, so good luck).

I imagine that's a problem many projects would face trying to use the RAD Basic IDE, too and I don't think it's possible for it to be "no migration", because there will be components that won't work, won't relicense, etc.

They seem to want to "evolve" the language (there's a mention of wanting to add things like try... catch while maintaining compatibility).

Unfortunately the biggest challenge will be third party components. I work with clients who want to migrate VB6 on a daily basis and I don't remember the last time I saw an application without multiple third party libraries. Many of these can no longer be installed in new versions of Windows and so clients are stuck on Windows XP/7 (Even though you can have VB6 installed on W11).

Good question, you can run VB6 directly if you still have a copy.

> if you still have a copy

I think you just answered your own question.

There are copies on the internet aplenty.

Each one carrying the risk of onboarding your PC into some miscreant's Command & Control system, or just plain encrypting your disks and making your life a misery. Good luck.

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