Slashdot Mirror
Confirmed: Microsoft Says It Will Open Source VB 6
msmoriarty writes "Microsoft told a group of MVPs today at Tech-Ed that it plans to take Visual Basic 6 open source and will release the source code on CodePlex. A source at the event said that Microsoft is planning to release only the VB6 language on codeplex – not Visual Studio or related tools." Update: 05/20 02:24 GMT by T : Alas, too good to be true. msmoriarty writes with an apologetic retraction: "We got it wrong — Microsoft denied and went back to our source and they pulled confirmation. Our apologies."
That's nice and all, but does anyone care?
I mean, I guess there are some legacy projects out there that are still being maintained, but I'm sure those developers bought VS a long time ago.
Or is there some secret in the VB6 code that the open source community can actually learn from?
Got Apathy?
Once Visual Basic becomes an open source project the public's perception of Open Source software will plummet.
Will it be one of their "shared source" licenses or will it be a true open source license like the BSD license or the IBM Common Public License?
http://twitter.com/#!/dseven/status/71352709785198592
@dseven The rumors of VB6 going open source are simply not true. #msteched #vb6rumor #vb6
http://twitter.com/#!/dseven/status/71359684904366081
@dseven @beckynagel I'm the Director of Product Management for Visual Studio Tools & Languages. There's no more solid source than me. Its not true.
The official statement we got from Microsoft was that the story was not confirmed -- it didn't deny it. Story has been updated with that. Invited Doug Seven to give official comment as well.
Our source on this is solid. Additional details were confirmed. We do stand by the story.
Well, we still haven't seen the license. But, assuming a real open source license (say, MS Reciprocal), it would be a big step to those goals.
And to improving VBA support in things like LibreOffice, too; VBA is a close relative of VB6.
Rob Osherove was joking when he tweeted that VB6 is being open sourced. If you look at his tweets, he followed that tweet with another with a link to "video of the official announcement" which is actually a link to Never Gonna Give Up. Looks like he was rickrolling. Anyway, Dough Seven, the Senior Product Manager of the Visual Team, had also tweeted that the rumors are not true. https://twitter.com/#!/dseven/status/71352709785198592 via http://digitizor.com/2011/05/20/microsoft-visual-basic-6-not-open-source/
This would have been nice a decade or so ago when they dumped VB6, resulting in lots of panicked and expensive migrations over to .NET. Many companies had made huge investments in VB6 and felt totally betrayed (I worked for one of them). They were hoping for a new improved version of VB6 to be released (some new features here and there) and instead they got something massively different.
If VB6 had been some kind of open standard back then, another company would have come along and basically said "Don't panic everyone, your huge investments in VB6 are safe. We are releasing OpenVB Studio and will continue to improve the language.". That would have been a disaster for Microsoft of course.
Seriously? News articles where tweets are being used as a primary source?
That's it, I'm giving up on Slashdot. It's jumped the shark.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
who'd have thought? from such reputable new sources, too!
twitter -> reddev -> timothy -> slashdot
damn, those nyt people must be shaking in their boots.
We had another source who heard it completely Separately from this source. But after we went back to the source with that denial he pulled his confirmation. We have issued a correction and are working to get the story out there to everyone that the story is NOT true. We are extremly sorry for this.
No, it doesn't.
VB6 has an _option_ to compile to p-code interpreted executables, which is not switched on by default.
Native binaries produced by VB6 _do_ have a lot of dependencies on the VB runtimes, because it uses them for a lot of it's internal implementation, like bounds checks on primitive types, it's String type, it's array type (which is not a raw array like C but an array class), but they are definitely native binaries. Many of these runtime checks contribute to the perception that VB6 is slow - you can turn a lot of them off in the compiler options. I think you might even be able to remove it's dependency on the runtimes, but that's really a bit pointless for what is designed to be a rapid prototyping / development system - it would be the equivalent of removing all the Python runtimes and wondering why your pace of development ground to a halt.
The main thing that makes people think VB6 is slow is they build large strings by concatenating them - because the VB6 String is an immutable BSTR, this means that every time you append a character, it copies the whole string. Unlike Java, it lacked a StringBuilder class in the base runtimes, and you had to roll your own using memcopy() APIs.
People think VB6 was terrible because it would let you get away with stupid crap. Couple that to it's relatively shallow learning curve and you got a lot of low-quality but otherwise functional programs written by people with less than stellar programming ability, which then go on to cause massive maintenance headaches for people who program professionally.
One of the ancestor posters was right on the money though - it was and remains a way of knocking out something functional very quickly. If you wanted to write something a little more complex in it, you had to be a real hard-ass with yourself, because VB would give you a lot of rope to hang yourself with. But with discipline, and sometimes some advanced tricks to work around it's limitations, you could write high quality, functional software, very quickly compared to C++.
My VB6 skills are kind of my pension plan... it really is the modern COBOL. I see so many job opportunities now that are thinly veiled "VB6 maintenance programmer" roles.