Recovery of function prototypes in Visual Basic 6 executables | Hacker News Reader

Recovery of function prototypes in Visual Basic 6 executables

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28 pointstodsacerdoti12 comments

I miss VB6. What's the closest modern thing to it? (VB.Net doesn't count, at least for me)

Depends on what you miss. Lazarus might be an alternative?

The language is obviously different, but if you miss the "get the GUI done" feature then Lazarus fits the bill.

I feel like VB6 was definitely a peak of the integration of beginning and advanced. I wonder if there's anything like it but for HTML, CSS, JS. The style of VB coding is basically frontend webdev today.

Retool is the closest thing I've seen to capturing the magic of early Visual Basic.

Does AutoIt count?

https://github.com/EsportToys/MouseTray

PureBasic or DarkBasic? Or just use VB6 and a paper bag over your head.

I miss it too. For me, the replacement is Web. It lacks VB's all-in-one-ness, and it lacks the GUI designer, but other than that, I can get a pretty close approximation of GUI toolkit with events binding.

I don't use almost any frameworks or toolkits, save for a cryptography module, and I am quite happy and getting a similar experience.

Bonus is if I keep it to 2010-ish era DOM-style code, I virtually never have to worry about cross-browser compatibility issues.

It pays to stay off the bleeding edge.

Gambas. Some related links at:

https://github.com/wekan/hx/tree/main/prototypes/ui/gambas

This mechanism is what enables the old ActiveX Scripting APIs (used by classic JScript and VBScript) to consume VB6 classes natively. It's very easy to embed a fully-functional scripting environment in a VB6 app and even define custom classes in VBScript to be consumed by VB6 code.

At one point you could also embed Python because there was a compatible COM wrapper for it, but it had performance and integration issues and maintenance eventually stopped.

Are you talking about pywin32? That's still maintained [1] and works great.

[1] https://github.com/mhammond/pywin32/

IIRC, there was a secondary component that acted as a full windows scripting host and could even be consumed within internet explorer to run python scripts much like how you could use vbscript in webpages at one point. (what an ill-advised little escapade that was). I'm not sure how you would even use it now, so maybe it still exists! I guess maybe you'd use wscript.exe with a special command line flag?

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