A browser-native classic Visual Basic VB6 IDE | Hacker News Reader

A browser-native classic Visual Basic VB6 IDE

wieslawsoltes.github.io

258 pointswiso88 comments

Looks good functionality wise, you can even "compile" an app to a HTML file. This is exactly how something like this should work :-).

However, appearance-wise it looks very noisy/distorted with some crooked elements (especially window buttons) and missing visual parts (mainly bevel edges). I made a screenshot with comments for it[0].

I guess this was made with AI which isn't that great at making stuff pixel-level unless you explicitly told it to check reference images and be pixel level precise, so i'd recommend firing up a VM with WinXP in classic theme mode (or even better, 86Box running Windows 95 or Windows 98) and grabbing a bunch of screenshots.

Also i found some bugs:

1. You cannot click on non-visual controls (or disabled controls) to select them (e.g. timer). You can still use the rect selection to select them and drag them around by resizing via the handles but clicking on them selects the form.

2. Adding a control doesn't update the controls list in the editor unless you double click a control without a handler (i.e. the form, as long as you remove the Form_Load handler). Even after the controls are updated, if the event list has only one event, you cannot have the editor add by selecting it (i guess because it is already the selected item and you don't receive an event about selecting it).

I tried to make a simple pong game but it seems no key or mouse motion events are implemented yet so all i did was to make a bouncing OptionButton :-P.

[0] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/iv/images/5ffbf1494821c77a3fe...

Its fun project and has many bugs still , its major work to make this fully work as one would expect, but keep checking I am putting many new features and fixes now. Thanks for feedback.

> appearance-wise it looks very noisy/distorted with some crooked elements (especially window buttons) and missing visual parts (mainly bevel edges).

Nitpicking. Let me reflect - runtimeterror.com has no https which is available for free, so I'm not entering it.

For the old coding environment nostalgic out there, I've made one for TurboPascal here: https://aryx.github.io/ocaml-elm-playground/apps/#programmin...

The property grid control is still the greatest general purpose UI of all time. Define your classes with some attributes and it just works. It was all downhill from there with web and mobile.

I always wonder how we have lost so many useful concepts in our tooling and IDEs.

The reason was the coders' mindset who entered the job market after 2000, maybe up to 2010, that the ability to code (to use a programming language) is the ultimate development of homo sapiens. With that solved by AI, we can safely start going back to simple, sane concepts like low-code and no-code, property sheets and drag & drop user interfaces.

Because I learned on this, it made learning everything else that much harder. Even today I wish there was something as functional, basic, and intuitive, even though I well.understand the reasons for doing things different ways.

From the same author: C# browser ide inspired by the modern visual studio https://github.com/wieslawsoltes/SharpForge

He has 500+ open source repositories including very advanced stuff like GPU powered gui framework and game engine components ( https://wieslawsoltes.github.io/Home ). It's very impressive and almost hard to believe that a single person could make all of this, even with help of modern ai agents.

Why's it hard to believe? AI tools can generate enormous quantities of slop if you have the money to spend.

The real test is if any of it is any good or not.

It is the norm for capable developers. You don't need AI slop for it. Linus Torvalds took a week or two off to out-build the version control industry.

Competent developers have, can, and will out-build entire industries in a week.

Its new era, you can build, experiment and do fun projects at will , takes few hours to get anything into working prototype. Some of projects might fail, be buggy but exploration pace is unmatched and fun level too.

VB6 compressed a lot of the software development loop into one environment: change a property in a control, attach a behaviour and run.

I am wondering if newer avatars of coding agents can bring that back. Two reasons 1) Code generation is getting faster 2) More and more code is becoming a detail that is expected to work

Imagine a RAD where we have a VB6 like experience and can dive into real code (agent-generated) when the abstraction breaks.

Best part of VB5 was that when you hit F1, you instantly got help for whatever was under the cursor. VB6 changed it to use some much slower MSDN help system instead.

This was also the best part of QBASIC.

It was just wonderful. I owe so much to that thoughtful feature as a child.

I wish I could meet the person who decided that. You’ve changed my life.

It was the best part of turbo pascal as well. Before IDEs decided to hide information.

Wow, this feels almost like the real thing.

Is there something similar for the web now? Easy UI editor but a fully featured language behind with direct database access.

For what it's worth, I'm thinking of some version of this for my upcoming game's modding tools, although the backend processing will be on a web server unlike this demo, and there is much more of an AI agent focus.

This is pretty much exactly https://anvil.works (I'm a founder). The full-featured language is Python (both server and client side). Hit Publish and we'll host it for you (database included), or git-clone it and self-host.

There are a bunch of escape hatches if you want to get to the lower level platform (eg use JS libraries, or express a particular piece of styling in HTML+CSS), but the core experience is very VB-like: drag, drop, edit properties, run code on events.

Slick! Thanks for bringing back some memories of how i got into programming; by automating math-homework in visual basic.

Childhood resurrected, awesome! 30+ years later, I'm still super fast in it, lol. Thanks!

These kinds of browser recreations of old native apps always fails at text rendering.

LLMs lack taste

What's wrong with it? Sure it's way more higher quality but the layout seems... fine?

Yeah, it’s not 100% correct (some margins are off to my eye) but it’s okay.

Some texts on the other hand scream LLM to me. E.g. this label in the Print Code dialog:

> Opens a browser print window containing source only. Browser and operating-system print settings remain native.

This is just not how humans write. In fact, I don’t think a human would write anything here – it’s an implementation detail, not something that should be user-facing.

This is nostalgic. Although I think VB didn't have anti-aliasing back then. However, I remember creating an app with a UI and MS Access to store data with VB and it felt like magic to me.

Well pixel perfect would require different rendering approach. I am adding new WebGPU rendering engine and might add this original look as option too.

Good times! My first programming language :)

I remember sitting in class in school, writing out programs on paper for me to try out at home

I already forgot I did that too. Too bad you can't relive parts of your life '_'

3 - 3.01 = -0.009999999999999

That brings me back.

Nice job - definitely consider implementing at least a little bit of the Win32 API layer! For kicks I tried importing an old highschool VB6 map editor at it which uses BitBlt but sadly it didn't work.

Yeah working adding some basic Win32 api compatibility.

That's great! I used to love creating UI with VB6 when I was a teenager in high school.

I promise I will not hack the project when OLE controls become available.

Oooh beautiful! Visual Foxpro was the same, only the language changed but their screen designers were almost identical

And the Visual Studio, obviously :-)

Also MS Access form designer was quite like that; I kinda miss it.

Awesome! If only we could publish the programs as a PWA :)

This would be awesome

Thoughts on tools capable of that?

- Xojo is a commercial tool which I believe does that (but with a price and license to match)

- MoonBasic seems like a promising start

- Gambas for folks using Linux?

- For folks using the very affordable PureBasic there is the matching (also commercial, just about as affordable) SpiderBasic

Naturally if one extends the search to other languages there are lots of options, but Lazarus with a .js Object Pascal compiler seems worth mentioning. For my part, I was swayed when flet.dev announced their v1.0 and so went the Python route....

Have you tried File → Make [ProjectName].html...?

FWIW, the File menu has a command to export the program as a self-contained HTML file.

You can export apps as single page html, more original exports are on the works but it more complex.

Looks great! However using an active trademark from a mega corp seems like risky move even for a fun project.

The speed with which this thing launches in a browser should put shame on the faces of current IDE developers. While VB itself was nothing to write home about there certainly was something lost when hardware became more powerful. Imagine what current and 'recent' hardware were capable of if only efficiency was taken seriously again. Maybe generative AI can provide a boost where human developers would rather spend their time on chasing the latest fads, adding yet another feature or inversely removing even more functionality in an attempt to create the 'perfect' sparse application? Let the humans think up the features and write the initial implementation, then loosen the bots on the code to make it run as efficiently as possible on hardware which used to be current a few generations back.

The power relationship between the computer and the human has shifted since then. We want our computers to run slower so we don’t feel quite so inferior.

I don't. It's a machine, it should be fast and efficient.

Are you sure? A UI based on instant gratification? Seeing everything simply blink into place instantly might not be as fun as you think after the newness wears out.

Anyway, if you really want to, you can emulate old OSs with a very fast modern computer. Some emulators even bridge the network and file system to support enough that you can really live in it.

I would love if everything on a computer were instant. One of the fastest programs I use is Sublime Merge for a Git UI. It opens and does everything so fast, and I love it. Since the first time I opened it, I haven't even opened the previous Git GUI I was using, even though I like both their UIs about the same. I had to buy Sublime Merge, compared to the free app I was using before it.

It's not just me who prefers everything as fast as possible, but true of people in general. Google measured that slowing down loading a search page by only 400ms caused people to do fewer searches. And the biggest reason I heard people say they switched to Chrome was that it was faster than other browsers (which was true for the first couple years after release).

> Are you sure? A UI based on instant gratification? Seeing everything simply blink into place instantly might not be as fun as you think after the newness wears out.

laughs in Amiga

I guess you don't have the same opinion with your vehicle.

Debugging and IntelliSense don't work, and the deliverable isn't a .exe but an .html (though it works). Wondering if it can access ODBC lol.

I reckon you might be asking for a little too much from a single web dev there.

This takes me back! Right clicking works too, this is awesome. I miss property tables, that was a nice UX. Flash had it too.

really cool! brings the memories back.. I used to create few shareware products back then with VB3 - VB6.

easy way to trigger an Epic developer

Wait Epic as in the medical software is written in VB6‽

The GUI parts are or were.

And parts of their patient portal website were still VB6 on the backend a decade ago, not sure that's true anymore. Visual Basic 6 as a web backend.

VB was the backend language for the vast majority of original Active Server Pages sites.

My memory may fail me, but I'm pretty sure ASP used VBScript, not regular VB. Similar syntax but not the same runtime/environment. ASP could use any Active Scripting language (the other language shipped with Windows being JScript, MS's impl of a subset of JS)

You're correct. I did a ton of ASP in JScript back in the day, but VBScript was much more common.

Here's something that will bake your noodle. Sage 100, the accounting/ERP software, is still to my knowledge written in Business BASIC from the 1970s—specifically the variant that ran on MAI Basic Four minicomputers (just 64 KiB of RAM!). This variant of BASIC was so, as Claude says, load-bearing that several companies emerged to support source-compatible versions on a variety of platforms as the non-mainframe business world evolved from custom-schmustom minicomputers to Unix workstations and PCs. The most common variants today are BASIS International's BBx and BBj (Java), and ProvideX. Sage 100, originally MAS 90 and MAS 200, was an accounting solution originally developed for those 1970s minicomputers and then forward-ported to new platforms as the business landscape evolved.

For anyone who has had to touch any desktop version of Sage in 2026, this is not at all a surprise.

I dealt with ProvideX code for a Customer who was using an industry-specific customized version of MAS 90. I managed to see some of the source (under NDA) of the customizations and it was fucking horrifying-- line numbers and GOTOs and global variables. It makes my eyes burn a little thinking about it...

Damn... brings back memories...

How does it compare with

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42105869

This one supports opening existing projects

My first <del>love</del>IDE…

Wow, that's great. It brings back so many memories

Uhoh, that'll bring back 1-based array indices

Was this done with an LLM? Repo?

Their github account lists over 5,000 commits and 1,500 pull requests... just in the last 4 days.

Yes, if you look at the developer's Twitter account they've shared a large number of projects in the past week, including in-browser recreations of Windows Vista, XP, 2000, ME, 98, 95, 3.1, Mac OS 9, Word, Excel, OneNote, Access, Visio, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Reader, a Git Client, a CAD program, a video editor, etc. https://x.com/wieslawsoltes

Looking through his work it seems that he has build a whole .net browser based ecosystem [1]. Pretty impressive its own right. However, for his showcase projects I was wondering how he'd prompt to guide these recreations, i.e. what is used as the input, I can't image that he'd describe every tiny detail...

[1] https://wieslawsoltes.github.io/Home/ecosystem/

I was wondering how he'd prompt to guide these recreations, i.e. what is used as the input, I can't image that he'd describe every tiny detail...

I thought the same way when I saw some impressive AI-generated videos not long ago, and I suspect the author prompted AI to get a basic idea, and then possibly after many iterations, finished it up with manual editing.

Author of this one shared the exact process https://x.com/anabology/status/2106473469441384788

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1aIbRs2f6sVpCxO4TGoBf... (direction-log.md shows all the human provided input). It is far less than you'd think.

I wonder how much did it cost.

Kind of cool how far the browser as platform progressed.

We look back at people's computers, say, 30 years ago now.

And in 30 years the people will look back at us and wonder why we sucked so much. Or, AI skynet slop is winning, then we all look up to our AI overlords.

This is amazing

talk about a blast from the past!

Intellisense?

Was that there?

What do you mean?

Does the site have intellisense? Yes

Did VB6 have intellisense? Also yes

IIRC even QuickBASIC 4.5 had a form of "IntelliSense" in the form of hints as to the defined data structure, if provided in DECLARE statements. F1 hints are mentioned elsewhere for built-ins but I seem to recall it (or a similar quick action) also working for a smart of "what kind of data are you allowed to pass to this user defined subroutine or function".

So I think you're talking about TYPES.

  TYPE PERSON
    AGE AS INTEGER
    FIRSTNAME AS STRING * 12
  END TYPE

  DIM KURTZ AS PERSON


  PRINT KURTZ._

You could do something like this, but it wouldn’t provide any kind of code completion or autocomplete to show the AGE/FIRSTNAME fields where the underscore represents the text cursor.

However you are right that if you hit F1 on KURTZ it would then show User defined PERSON, and then you could hit F1 again and it would show built-in help of user defined TYPE with AGE/FIRSTNAME properties. Sort of like context-sensitive help I guess.

As far as subroutines/functions go, if you tried to pass data into a subroutine where the data couldn’t be coerced, it would just give you a generic type mismatch.

  DIM Y AS SINGLE
  Y = 10.5

  PRINTIT  Y   ' Throws parameter type mismatch
  PRINTIT (Y) ' Succeeds through a self-evaluated expression which is effectively BYVAL because Microsoft takes pain in your suffering.

  SUB PRINTIT (X%)
    PRINT X%
  END SUB

But to your point, you could point at PRINTIT and hit F1 and get a quick symbol look-up.

I've spent the last 6 months building a similar 1:1 faithful recreation of QBASIC and QuickBasic 4.5 that runs natively in the browser [1] - so I know way more about this than anyone should by right.

[1] - https://mordenstar.com/share/qbasic-core-demos

Wow. very nice, it even runs the app

OK, so I followed through to the author's GitHub page and the project's repository and...

no CLAUDE.md, no AGENTS.md, no SKILL.md, no .claude or .agents directories either.

Dare we dream? A project this ambitious, done without AI help? I'm getting that feeling like when I see a piece of really well done art come across my feed—and it was done entirely by a human!

> no CLAUDE.md, no AGENTS.md, no SKILL.md, no .claude or .agents directories either.

Untracked.

Unfortunately I have to point you at some of the other comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958929

Reply on news.ycombinator.com