6 ms·

PureBasic: The Quiet Survivor

16 points by svenfaw 7mo ago

tredre3 7mo ago
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 https://www.purebasic.fr/blog/?p=554
mikeponders 7mo ago
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/development/compiling/optimizing_for_size.html#detecting-used-features-from-the-current-project-and-disabling-unused-features https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/engine_details/develo... https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/editor/using_engine_compilation_configuration_editor.html#doc-engine-compilation-configuration-editor https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/editor/usin...
avadodin 7mo ago
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.
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  They don't even get how we wrote applications across 8 and 16 bit home computers. Thankfully they would never managed to run Electron.
pjmlp 7mo ago
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_basic.php 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.
jamespo 7mo ago
Wow 79 euros for a lifetime license!?
irq-1 7mo ago
Some other options. https://github.com/andlabs/libui 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/ 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 https://github.com/fltk/fltk > FLTK provides modern GUI functionality without bloat ... Not native, but small, dependable and cross-platform.

16 points by svenfaw 7mo ago

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 https://www.purebasic.fr/blog/?p=554

mikeponders 7mo ago

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/development/compiling/optimizing_for_size.html#detecting-used-features-from-the-current-project-and-disabling-unused-features https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/engine_details/develo... https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/editor/using_engine_compilation_configuration_editor.html#doc-engine-compilation-configuration-editor https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/editor/usin...

avadodin 7mo ago

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.

pjmlp 7mo ago
They don't even get how we wrote applications across 8 and 16 bit home computers. Thankfully they would never managed to run Electron.

pjmlp 7mo ago

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_basic.php 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.

jamespo 7mo ago

Wow 79 euros for a lifetime license!?

irq-1 7mo ago

Some other options. https://github.com/andlabs/libui 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/ 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 https://github.com/fltk/fltk > FLTK provides modern GUI functionality without bloat ... Not native, but small, dependable and cross-platform.