PureBasic: The Quiet Survivor

PureBasic is very neat. I bought my license almost 20 years ago and I still use it to make small GUI utilities. It's a very nice IDE/editor and the famfamfam icons are always comfy.

It's still alive because it's a passion project for the developer, he doesn't make a lot of money from it. Not because the tool declined in quality, but because nowadays efficient RAD is a very niche market and the licenses are still valid for the lifetime (again showing the passion to the product rather than optimizing income).

See this interview for some details: https://www.purebasic.fr/blog/?p=554

Some other options.

https://github.com/andlabs/libui

> Simple and portable (but not inflexible) GUI library in C that uses the native GUI technologies of each platform it supports.

Missing a lot of desktop features and abandoned.

https://wxwidgets.org/

> wxWidgets is a C++ library that lets developers create applications for Windows, macOS, Linux and other platforms with a single code base.

https://github.com/fltk/fltk

> FLTK provides modern GUI functionality without bloat ...

Not native, but small, dependable and cross-platform.

If you think about it, Godot fits very well and is very, very cross-platform. It brings somewhat more but you can strip it down to only the necessary, throwing away the 3D stuff and keeping only what you use. It includes a scripting language and the GUI stuff. Someone could actually build a specific solution with it!

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/engine_details/develo...

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/editor/usin...

On the PC, my introduction to systems programming and Borland ecosystem, after some months of GW-BASIC, was Turbo BASIC.

Already a great experience with a structured compiled BASIC in 1991, and what made me look into other Borland languages.

https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/Software/borland_turbo_basi...

Nowadays it lives on as PowerBASIC.

I don't get the downplay of Delphi or C++ Builder, other that they aren't cool.

The elephant in the room is that, as all of the mentioned current solutions render their own controls, there isn't a native-look anymore.

I doubt anyone in GenZ or below appreciates the effort put into making a native text field work consistently enough across platforms.

Wow 79 euros for a lifetime license!?