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Comment by scrlk | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that nothing has filled the void that VB6 left behind in the rapid application development space. The language wasn't great, but VB6's strength was the drag and drop GUI builder.

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As another user suggested, Lazarus is worth of consideration, although for a more VB-like experience, Gambas might be interesting too.

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html

Same paradigm with UI stored in manually editable files

https://qb64.com/inform.html

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Drag and drop UI design kept me using qtcreator for way longer than I would have otherwise. Usefully, you can just plonk the layout file next to your python script to use it with pyqt, since the IDE's python support isn't great. (may just be my borked install)

Xojo is basically VB6's spiritual successor.

https://xojo.com/

VB6's strength was that Windows was a virtual monopoly at the time. Today you have more fragmentation, where the user masses are still mostly on Windows but the developers are mostly on Macs or Linux.

Developing a desktop GUI framework for a single platform is relatively easy. Developing a cross-platform GUI framework for three or more platforms is extremely hard. And a lot of people would STILL ignore it if it's not "mobile first", targeting iOS and Android too (meaning that it's probably dogshit for desktop apps).

> but the developers are mostly on Macs or Linux.

Is that really true outside of web devs?

I haven't felt any void. 20+ years of Qt, Delphi and then Lazarus was enough.

It’s easier to spin up something as a local web server these days for the majority

wxformbuilder can get you 80% there

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