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Free IDE Gambas Reaches 1.0
A few months ago, the GPL IDE Gambas reached 1.0 release candidate phase, and now reader drfreak writes "Gambas has now hit 1.0 and looks promising as GNU/Linux's answer to Visual Basic. Now, if it ran in Windows too, it would truly crush VB for database applications. Check it out at gambas.sourceforge.net." A 1.0.1 release came out on January 3rd to fix a few bugs.
This project aims at making a graphical development environment based on a Basic interpreter, so that we have a language like Visual Basic(TM) under Linux(TM). The phenomenal quantity of bugs and inconsistencies that makes Visual Basic so delightful persuaded me to start this project ;-)
It seems that Microsoft is aware of the poor quality of its language, as VB .Net is not backward compatible with older versions of Visual Basic. I think they have thrown away the Visual Basic interpreter source code, and that VB .Net is just a .Net runtime compiler whose syntax looks like the Visual Basic one. Well, it's just my own opinion... ;-)
I want to clear up any misunderstanding immediately. Gambas does not try to be compatible with Visual Basic, and will never be. I'm convinced that its syntax and internals are far better than the one's of its proprietary cousin ;-)
I took from Visual Basic what I found useful : the Basic language, the development environment, and the easiness to quickly make programs with user interfaces.
But I dislike the very bad level of common Visual Basic programmers, often due to bad pratices imposed by the bugs and strangeness of this language. So I will try to make Gambas as coherent, logical and reliable as possible, and I hope that Gambas programmers will make effort in return ! ;-)
At the moment, I'm looking for programming help. The kernel of Gambas is now stabilized, if not well documented. There is a component example to help people learning how to write components.
I hope other people will join me to help to increase the possibilities of the language. There is so much to do !
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Purists may smirk at this, being VB-like and all, but I just compiled this from source and had a play... it's incredibly well done. I'm really impressed. I'd love to see something like this which builds proper executables and allows C or C++ for the language.
I haven't had a chance to investigate further (should be working, after all!) but does anybody know what you need to distribute to get an app working on another box? Does the RPM it creates install all the required libs etc or do they need Gambas installed too?
You're right it ain't free - It's $600 for the version that will work for all three OSes, or a grand if you want a 12 month subscription. Kind of steep for those of us who just fool around with computers for fun rather than work.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Yeah, but elements aren't supported on IE :)
Or try Lazarus:
http://lazarus.freepascal.org
>Coders write quick'n'dirty VB apps with the intention of redoing them in (for example) C++ later.
Back in the VB5/6 days i never heard anyone who did VB stuff that this is only meant as prototype. it was allways meant to be released as VB App. (with some DLLs written in VC++)
Some of us who use and develop Gambas agree with you. I began work on an MDI IDE for Gambas a year and a half ago, and released actual working code, but the language was such a moving target at that time (version 0.57) that I had to abandon it. I hope to produce one for Gambas 1.0 in the near future, and Benoit plans to add MDI functionality to the IDE in the development series for 2.0.
VB has really terrible exception handling which DOES make it hard to write reliable code. It also has pathetic data structures which makes it difficult to write efficient code.
As noted in a previous response, Tk actually has a themed widget extension call tile:
http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/
This works well enough for production apps now, but it will also become part of the Tk core in the near future. They interoperate with all existing Tk widgets, and the extension works with Perl's Tcl::Tk binding and with Tkinter.
Even without that, it is not more than a dozen lines of code to polish up the look of most Tk apps, it is just that many don't put that last spit and polish step into their code.
I think you can do anything you whish :) you have full source code access so you probably can compile a one static lib with everything in it...
Cross-platform (non-RAD... yet) C++ IDE "codeblocks" (developed by a former Dev-C++ developer) version 1.0b4 was released yesterday.