http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/doc/diffvb lists "Differences From Visual Basic" and says "Gambas is not intended to be a clone of Microsoft Visual Basic" and "you can't simply copy your VB projects over and expect them to compile under Gambas".
Cleaner? Prettier? That's a preference. Having the catch below allows you to see everything at once. Complexity can be encapsulation in readable functions/class method names, etc if your catch does too much.
The construction being referenced is On Error [ERR_NO] Goto LABEL, which is not usually local to the error, and, depending on the dialect may be a generic handler that first needs to figure out what error it's handling.
It sets Err. Which is essentially how SH, C and Go work too.
(With the obvious exceptions of longjmp and panic/defer, global vs local var, and Go forcing to assign the error.)
On Error Resume Next isn't great, but calling it much worse than On Error Goto, or much worse than other languages, is a stretch.
My point is only that people complain about it in VB disproportionally often compared to other languages. (Does that mitigate the issue to some extent, if every VB dev is super aware of it?)
I don’t think I’ve ever seen any vb code which actually checks that, though,or dry little, certainly. In C and Go you get something returned, which is a hint that you should maybe do something with it. In VB a magic global variable is set, and then generally ignored.
That's how I've done it. Enable it before the line(s) in question, then check err.number, and add "On Error Goto 0" after that so you get the default handler again.
Usually much cleaner than jumping to somewhere else, but that had its uses too.
Ah. I was never actually a VB programmer, but I did have a few side-jobs porting VB apps (mostly CRUD webapps) to something more modern in the mid-noughties. My experience from that was that real world use of on error resume next was to turn it on and leave it on.
A great piece of software which, very important, runs native on ARM. That is, no cross compiling required to write and compile software for small ARM boards.
It's alright, and way better than Electron Cancer.
For Gambas models, does it have built-in models that can update their own views or is it all retained mode like all the other GUIs. The one big advantage of web frameworks seems to be how they're immediate mode (using things like the Shadow DOM) so you don't have to emit state changes. It doesn't seem like they're very many non-web based GUI toolkits which can do that (which aren't minimalist and meant for games)
Yeah. I'm waiting on Red, but have been waiting a long time.
On another note, one commercial option that is very cheap (like $250 for a professional license that is perpetual for that version and collects $0 royalties), but can build GUIs for (Windows, Linux, OSx, Raspberry Pi, Android, and iOS) and has very good built-in database support, encryption, audio, assembly...etc is the forth based 8th language. You can get source with an NDA and $2500 if you really need it. I've only played with it so far, but it is crazy fun and has a lot of built-in goodies. The author fixes many bugs in like hours and will push a new version same day for zero cost.
Yes. It basically outputs the executable binary for the target you choose when compiling your Haxe code.
It means you write Haxe source and the 'compiler' (transpiler, actually) generates code for the choosen target. It will then compile the generated code using the target compiler installed in your system, if necessary (when you target C++, for example).
For Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android: check out AppStudio. It lets you code in VB like BASIC. A VB like Design Screen lets you drag and drop visual controls. Output is JavaScript/HTML so it runs everywhere. (Disclosure - I'm on the team)
https://www.appstudio.dev/
This is fantastic. I've lamented the lack of a good GUI and environment for making desktop apps since VB 4, but it looks like they never went away.
Gambas looks fantastic, and exactly as easy to develop with as I remember VB 4 being. I can't say I can stomach the language it uses, but something like this for Python would be a godsend.
I remember reading about this some time ago, like almost 10 years ago. So you have to wonder if there are businesses out there using Gambas web apps without knowing it. :-) Some of the developers who use Gambas are very experienced.
The phenomenal quantity of bugs and inconsistencies that makes Visual Basic so delightful persuaded me to start this project
It seems that Microsoft was aware of the poor quality of its language, as VB .Net is not backward compatible with older versions of Visual Basic.
I dislike the bad level of common Visual Basic programmers, often due to bad pratices imposed by the bugs and strangeness of this language.
Pity he couldn't resist taknng a swipe at vb and vb programmers in his introduction. Also he's inaccurate wrt to his comments about why Microsoft didn't make a vb7.
SourceForge has now long been under a different ownership then when the shaddy crap happened. Since ownership changed there has been no shaddy behavior.
funny, cuz that's what I call VB programmers...
lol jk
This is an interesting project, but in my experience with companies that still use VB6 or VB.net (they have no idea about linux nor a desire to learn anything new... hence why they are still on VB6)
A friend that runs a one man shop developing websites and native apps swears by it. He actually moved his new developments from Lazarus to Xojo and is always talking about the upcoming Xojo web 2.0.
I gave it a try a few times but it never clicked. I felt constrained by the language (Lisp, Smalltalk and Forth ruined me for life) and the runtime is nothing to write home about. For most people I guess it doesn't matter. My friend doesn't even know what reference counting is and wants something simple to get stuff done.
To me, these are what computing should be all about: blurring the distinction between user/programmer, but providing gradations of complexity, comprehensiveness, and control.
Lazarus aside, it seems FOSS isn't going to give us the kind of RAD tools that one might hope for -- thinks more like Hypercard and related. Such efforts require the kind of resources (long periods of time and good funding, to start) that loose networks of casual contributors are never going to be able to provide. And in today's world, where next-quarter reporting and shareholder primacy dominate enterprise decisions, it's even rare to get something truly immersive and new from commercial entities (Apple is the biggest corp in the world. Do they have something like their ATG group from the 90s? If so, what the hell are they working on?)
> Lisp, Smalltalk and Forth ruined me for life)
Same here, but there's a (partial) reason these aren't really viable in today's computing culture. The first is that they really are for whole computing systems that don't necessarily make a distinction between user and programmer. The culture we have today is the opposite of this: users are consumers, first and foremost. Computing systems are thus mechanisms that run isolated "applications" whose ability to be modified by regular people is severely limited compared to what we know (and have known for 4 decades) is possible.
Well let's say you need an app to program IP addy info into a IOT device on the LAN. Multi-platform done in 1 hour. You can also write web apps, drag and drop, we're really excited for the web 2.0 coming this year.
Their instructions for compiling it on Cygwin hints on its dependencies. Looks like a long list, but many of those probably have ports for other plaforms (e.g. Windows). The Wikipedia article says it has been ported to Mac and FreeBSD "based on using local versions of the X11 system". Perhaps these are leads...
I won't, but I will help any people trying to do that.
Gambas already runs under Cygwin. Note that there is a lot of things to port, if you want to do a native port: process management, gb.qt4 component, and so on... This is a huge job. The most promising compiler target would be Mingw-w64, which also allows cross compilation on a unix-like system."
If you use Gambas for making web apps, then you could use webbrowser to access those apps. Gambas IDE has wizard for web app, and some components that can be dragged to form. From some forum discussions I have read that debugging those web apps is easier then debugging php apps.
The issue I've had with cross platform VB-like languages is they all ended up just compiling to C, which meant losing all the great IDE-integrated debugging.
Don't you think that "ideological reasons" can be quite a good reason to do things?
Besides, following ideological reasons only means to value certain (other) aspects higher for evaluating the question how good something is.
Usually the term ideological implies (in my book) that a person is considering the greater good, and willing to take a step back in own convenience. That sounds like a nice person to me. Maybe you could spare some curiosity for their reasons?
Sometimes it's because someone wants to leverage the colossal investment already made in VB code and being able to run and maintain it on Linux is better than being locked to Windows anyway.
