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Comment by Renaud | Hacker News Reader

Are there still working and available ide and compilers for vb6?

Any open source ones?

After working on vba for MSAccess for a few years I came to both appreciate and hate it.

It’s fast, small in features compared to modern languages, but a pleasure to hack around and find ways to expand its capabilities.

I made simple ORM with it, autogenerating classes from a database, went into the rabbit hole of modernising the dialog box to properly display unicode and make it richer, extended it with string classes taken from .Net, played with COM, the ribbon, etc

Maddening at time but so satisfying to play with. And it was for a useful purpose.

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There are (at least) two project in development aiming to make a modern VB6 with full backwards compatibility:

https://twinbasic.com/

https://www.radbasic.dev/

Especially Twin Basic looks good IMHO. Looking forward to testing it on my old applications!

There was also another one written in Java which was (supposedly) very compatible too and had a full working IDE, etc, but it was abandoned long ago and has been lost in the mists of time. Actually there was a much older project that was compatible with VB4 (i think) and IIRC it was made when Microsoft still worked on classic VB, but again, abandoned and lost.

None of these were open source, like the two you mentioned, which if history is any indication it means that they will be eventually lost too.

> There was also another one written in Java which was (supposedly) very compatible too and had a full working IDE, etc, but it was abandoned long ago and has been lost in the mists of time.

That was probably Jabaco[0]. Shame it wasn't open sourced. I played with it back in 2014-ish.

[0] http://jabaco.com

The VB6 IDE can still be installed on Windows 10 and probably 11.

See https://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?898205-Can-Visual-St...

I don't think Microsoft will come after you for doing it even if you use a pirate copy.

My company still maintains a VB6 program that we just keep that IDE alive in an XP VM. I can attest that the VB6 applications will work on Win10 & Win11 with only minimal effort to get the required libraries so I would not be shocked to learn the IDE works too

At work we created a vscode extension to use VB6. It's not a language server because it would need to interpret the syntax and all that but helps handling multiple projects, automatically cleaning registrations, checking vbp references and dependencies, etc.

TheRasteri has a video on getting VB6 running on a modern system, it's not pretty: https://youtu.be/LVEsNUm04Sc

I heard GAMBAS is one. Not tried it. Was mentioned on HN recently and in the past too.

Gambas is not compatible with VB. Similar capabilities in many ways but it can't compile VB.

Good to know.

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