TwinBASIC: A modern BASIC aiming for 100% compatibility with VB6/VBA

Qt (the legacy Qt::Widget variant) is quite productive for quick and dirty GUIs. You can do 95% of basic dialogs in QtDesigner and then connect the signals to your code and vice versa. The code can be Python or C++. It can also be mapped 1:1 into SQLite tables without any external libraries, which is handy for basic forms or data apps.

QML also has GUI design tools, but it takes much longer to learn and isn't very good at simple GUIs. However it's better when you need to deploy on Android (iOS requires the paid version).

One thing to keep in mind if the LGPL3 license. If the app isn't distributed, then it's fine, but if distributed, it has to be dynamically linked with some ways of swapping the .so/.dylib/.dll

There is a rather unfortunate lack of such tools today, which is very annoying. GUIs are visual so creating and editing them visually should be the no-brainer "right way" to do it, but instead programmers have abandoned it and embraced gigantic slow overcomplicated webshit for GUIs.

If you have a visual WYSIWYG designer and, importantly, aren't stubbornly intent on reinventing the wheel, then GUI isn't actually that hard.

Plus Tk has bindings in about every language in existence, so you can choose your favourite : Tcl of course, but also C, C++, Python, Perl, PHP...

Glad I'm not the only one who has been avoiding Lazarus due to Pascal. Too many scars.

Why not looking into VB.net? I mean I know that Microsoft is trying to kill it so not sure it is a long term solution, though I would expect long term support even if you don’t get new features.

If you are familiar with VB6 there is not a lot of difference. Set keyword removed. All collection zero based instead of inconsistent 0 and 1 based. A null and empty string are two different things. Parameters are byval by default instead of byref by default. And you get lots of nice features: generic, linq, return keyword, try/catch, etc. Otherwise the syntax is the same, and winform also works in a very similar way.

I did the transition VB6 => VB.net => C# (the latter when VB got deprecated).

There is a free community edition, no?

> as someone else said it basically replaces one proprietary commercial VBA with another proprietary commercial VBA.

Yeah, that's definitely a downside. I appreciate the author believes they can commercialise this more successfully if it's proprietary, but /personally/ I'd prefer something open source. One day I'll finish my own open source VB6 clone.

> There have been at least a couple of those who ended up being abandoned.

You're right. History is littered with abandoned VB6 replacements. Anybody remember GNOME Basic?

Nonetheless, credit where credit is due. Technologically, it looks like TwinBASIC has good foundations. It had a language server, although the VSCode extension is on hold for now. It imports VB6 project files, unlike looser VB6 alternatives like Gambas. And a combined Dim / Let (=) statement is long overdue.

sums up my feelings exactly!

> RAD Basic may offer compatibility too

It's an interesting question. It looks like TwinBASIC embraces the OLE/COM/ActiveX model as its native model. VARIANTS and BSTRs. This means advanced patterns like ObjPtr and StrPtr can work, assuming other compatibility is high.

I'm unsure about RAD Basic here, but a contentious thread of VBForums suggests it differs here.

Now, arguably ObjPtr and StrPtr aren't part of the semantics of VB6. Nonetheless, if you want compatibility with some real world code, it needs to work.

(I too have no connection with twinBASIC, except I'm a VB6 fan who is technologically impressed by it.)

At some point Microsoft (who no longer support the IDE) will also stop supporting the VB runtime, and companies will have no choice but to convert those old apps.

I doubt if there will ever be a VB6 revival.

I think they should focus on 100% compatibility, and 64bit code generation.

Perhaps allow the new Apps to connect to modern cloud services instead of MS access, or on premises SQL, preferably without anyone having to touch any code.

Also some kind of project analysis and auto-documentation so the new developers can understand what the project does, would be useful.

Access was huge. About 6 years ago I had to fix up a predecessors custom data logging program written in VB6 that used an access database. I had to patch a few things to eliminate hard coded paths and a fix for windows 7. First and only time I used VB6 and it was easy to dive into and figure out.

Until Windows drops 32-bit compatibility, VB6 apps will continue to run fine even if they do look f'ugly against todays UI design. In fact there's probably still a significant amount of industrial/heavy-commercial in-house applications written in VB still in use.

I can see a use case for TwinBASIC in maintaining these legacy apps, as the VB6 IDE no longer behaves itself under Windows 10/11. If it offers compilation to 64-bit (pseudo)code, then these apps will gain an extension on their usable life.

Visual Basic was mostly just used for line-of-business software -- forms, reports, etc. That's mostly been moved to the web, but it was seldom used for anything where performance was important.

To be fair, it's been that way for a long time. VB6 (and VB5) compiled to machine code, unlike earlier versions which were criticised for interpreting bytecode ("P-code").

Now, VB required some runtime dlls, namely msvbvm60.dll, and several ActiveX controls, but that feels small compared to even the .NET Framework. And tiny compared to your implied comparison with Electron/Chromium.

And it doesn't even have true threading in the language, you can do it, but its not like a language construct. What is beautiful about VB6 is your ability to use native DLLs and parts of the Win32 API as well.

I've been wanting to see a VB6 successor for a long time. I have debated paying for Xojo but I'm not a fan of their docs and havent built anything worthwhile yet to justify buying a license.

I'm curious also, looking at their issue tracking (discord server invite looks like its gone stale... ) it seems like not a lot of interest at the moment. But it is weird how much old VB stuff is out there and because so few people put any effort into the old VB world, I think people would pay a premium for something that's useful. Having said that, their community edition probably would suit nearly everyone. I'm guessing a few people might want cross platform... So not sure how they make money, it seems like they'd need 1000ish customers to make it viable for 2 people. At the moment most of the things that have user counts related to the project (youtube etc) is much much less than that... but, maybe once they have a solid release a lot more people will come out of the woodwork. Anyways, interesting to see how they go.

The target market is companies that can't afford to migrate away from legacy VB6 applications.

This is a very captive audience.

I couldn’t find the exact license on their site, but it seems the subscription is per developer, not per user of the built executables.

In companies that deploy software for hundreds of users, that makes a huge difference.

As a VB6 fan I'm excited to have a couple credible looking alternatives finally crop up. Of course, there's the 80-20 rule, and history is littered with similar attempts.

There's also Xojo which has quite a large community behind it.

Apparently it is fully compatible with vb6 (as also radbasic says they are). I never tried but long time ago I ported a slew of vb6 apps to Xojo (realbasic at the time) and that was not hard but it was definitely work and not fully compatible. I would use Xojo still though as it’s very mature and I trust them being around in a while.

VB 6 is a scripting language for COM objects so 100% compatibility means having a 100% compatible Windows environment to run those COM objects in.

So missed on VB.NET and what was the replacement to beat VB productivity outside Windows?

In 1981 I (mostly) happily paid full price for Microsoft BASIC for Heathkit HDOS. In 1995 I was one of those fools lining up at midnight for Windows95.

In 1996 I had just about finished porting my primary consulting project from VB3 to VB4... when VB5 came out and changed everything again. That's when I realized I had been taken for a ride; I cancelled my MSDN membership and began exiting the Microsoft ecosystem for Linux. Haven't touched a Microsoft or Apple product for over twenty years now and life is good.

It's been suggested: https://github.com/twinbasic/twinbasic/issues/570

> Who on Earth would rather have to end a function block by typing out "End Sub" instead of a curly brace

It’s called BASIC because it’s more approachable to beginners. End Sub is not as strange to someone new to programming as a curly brace because it is almost English and less abstract.

There's COBOL code at least twice, and possibly three times as old, that still runs billion dollar businesses every day, and likely will until you retire.

VB has its quirks but during its heyday, it was substantially more productive and easier to use than pretty much anything else.

I wouldn't be too quick to judge..... quick tell me what these braces close }}}} no idea huh? in VB, closing blocks will tell you what they are closing. So, not such a silly idea, just more verbose!

Lua, Ada, COBOL, Pascal, etc. There's a long list of languages in use across the industry that don't use C-style bracing.

Then there are languages like Python that end without a statement due to differing whitespace.

People who use national keyboard layouts in which {} is not easy to type, for example.

You don't actually have to type out End Sub, the IDE does that for you. You just type in the new procedure's name and the ide gives you the skeleton with the cursor inside.

There are a lot of eccentricities to complain about in VB, but somehow you have managed to only call out the features that were actually really common in a lot of other languages.

What about 1-based indexing and On Error Resume Next?

> Who on Earth would rather have to end a function block by typing out "End Sub" instead of a curly brace?

Someone who has to wait 10 minutes in line before a job submission window, holding a deck of punched cards, just to find out their program has syntax errors, and then repair as many of them as possible before repunching the cards and lining up again.

And that's about it.