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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Any time VB comes up I repeat my same wishlist item. I would love for Microsoft to open source it, in any way, shape or form. I would love for the community to take a crack at adding things to VB6 like bugfixes, any missing features (my understanding is they don't own everything about VB6) and just overall general improvements, imagine VB6 with threading. I know its ancient, but it can still produce a native GUI application effortlessly.

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I’d want this if only because I’m stuck maintaining old industrial software written in VB6 (it is omnipresent in manufacturing) and I’d like to have a development experience that is actually somewhat usable.

(No, TwinBasic isn’t adequate. No, a VB.NET migration isn’t feasible.)

As much as I love VB.NET for what it could have been, its definitely not the same.

VB.NET is open source, supports AOT, and there is little else that VB 6 does better, other than COM integration, which .NET was always a bit lower level

https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn

Now I bet what you mean is the graphical part, and yes that is only partial open source.

VB6 apps were compiled and did not need a special runtime. If Microsoft had never made .NET we would be in a different world where VB evolved to be a modern day Rust-like RAD language.

Yes they did, every programming language needs a runtime, unless we're taking about Assembly. C also has a tiny one, even though most folks don't think so.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualst...

One of the .NET design ideas was exactly to have a common runtime between VB6+, J++ and C++, using COM, but the lawsuit from Sun made them pivot to something else.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190111203733/https://blogs.msd...

This idea came back as WinRT, which they completly messed up, and for me it was how .NET 1.0 should have been in first place.

https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...

Unfortunely that ship has sailed, given how bad UWP landed.

The twinBASIC programming language is a modern VB6 - and it can import VB6 source code and forms.

twinBASIC and radbasic are two projects trying to clone it. But it's definitely harder to do than either anticipated. I still support VB6 apps (some of which are bumping up against the limit of the EXE size!) and I'd love a replacement, but it's slow going!

How hard could it be to just clone it, at this point?

I used to run it on a very crappy PC when it came out. The binary is probably pretty tiny and can likely be decompiled quite nicely with modern tools.

Gambas ;)

https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html

Its too married to GTK, not cross platform and I dont remember if it even compiles natively but thats something VB6 offers.

The point is that is was included in Windows.

Already enterprise approved on the MS stack.

I know HN is all startups with macbooks on local admin, but in bigger companies even devs cannot just install whatever they want.

VB was never included in Windows (although it did include the runtime files).

Windows did include other BASIC-related stuff, like GW-BASIC, QBasic, and VBScript.

Yes, not to program it but to run. But that makes the IDE and such an easy approval for management and IT to push out/install.

Also batch. aaah, I love cmd.

Perhaps the VBRUNxxx.dll files were distributed with Windows later, but not at first. You had to include them in your install diskettes.

I mean, for a “clean room implementation” you could offload the work to Claude and GPT, you have one model describe the assembly into a spec file, you pull down open source programs from Planet Source Code that SHOULD compile, and then you have it ensure it compiles 1:1. Then you watch and let it run through the process in a few weeks.

If you dont care about clean room then you plainly disassemble it and translate it. I live in the US where the second option might not be legal.

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