Microsoft Remains Firm On Ending VB6 Support

An anonymous reader submits "CNet reports that Microsoft is remaining firm an ending support for VB6, despite a petition and many requests from its developer community. If only VB were a F/OSS project instead of a proprietary customers could be assured of continued support as long as there was demand. Are there any good F/OSS implementations of VB out there for customers to migrate to? One can only hope that enlightened groups like the Agility Alliance would warn about the risks of using such software that can be end-of-lifed even while they're in heavy use."

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QBASIC horror story

[DrJimbo]

Many moons ago, I got called in to put out fires in a project that had a DOS based computer in part of the feedback loop of an industrial cutting machine. If the feedback wasn't fast enough the loop would open and things would break.

The software was written in QBASIC, which had just recently come out. I needed double precision (32 bit) integers for the control loop. QBASIC had this type built-in. Problem was that when I switched to 32 bit integers the program ran about 1,000 times slower and things in the real world got broken.

I couldn't figure it out. After carefully checking and re-checking my code, I did an assembly level debug. Turns out the brainiac billionaires at Microsoft had decided to "save" about 10 minutes of programming time by using floating point double precision for all their 32 bit calculations, even though 32 bit add and subtract were either already part of the machine language instruction set or took just two or three instructions at worst case. Instead, for every math operation the 32 bit values were converted to double precision floats, the calculation was done in floating point and then the answer was converted back to 32 bits. To make matters worse, the hardware didn't have a floating point co-proccessor (because the designer knew that no floating point calculations were needed) so all the floating point stuff was done in software emulation. Of course, there wasn't a word or a warning about this in any of the manuals.

Once I figured out the problem (morons had written the 32 bit integer support) I was able to write my own 32 bit routines in QBASIC that were 100's of times faster than Microsoft's built in routines, even without dipping down into assembly and taking advantage of the carry flag.

Quick Basic indeed! If it were any quicker it would be running backwards.