18 ms·

RAD Basic – Compatible with Visual Basic 6 projects

221 points by maxbaines 4y ago

robbiep 4y ago
That’s quite cool. I have such fond memories of (post qbasic) learning to program in VB
jll29 4y ago
Mac/Linux ports?
- kinard 4y ago
  If you want a x-platform VB like RAD take a look at XOJO.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    That brings back memories. I got a copy of that when it was called REALbasic and distributed on MacFormat magazine cover CDs. Sufficiently compatible with VB that I wrote some coursework on it for a teacher who only knew VB.
    - avidphantasm 4y ago
      It looks like Xojo is based on REALbasic as http://www.realsoftware.com/ http://www.realsoftware.com/ redirects to https://www.xojo.com/ https://www.xojo.com/.
      - garrypettet 4y ago
        Yeah they renamed it maybe 10 years ago (it’s pronounced Zo Joe). It’s a fast compiled BASIC like OOP language that runs natively on x86 and ARM.
  - garrypettet 4y ago
    I’ve been a happy user of Xojo (formally RealBasic) for about 20 years. It’s really powerful and free to use when getting started. I really like the all-in-one IDE and the ability to cross compile for macOS, Windows and Linux. Their desktop support is pretty good. Their iOS and web support not such much however. I think it’s a shame they are not more well known
- qalmakka 4y ago
  I wouldn't hold my breath. The original VB6 was chock-full of COM+ and lots of Windows specific stuff. I would rather attempt to migrate VB6 projects to Gambas (http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html) which is a modern FOSS take on (Visual) Basic. It's well maintained and runs pretty much everywhere.
  - badsectoracula 4y ago
    Last time i checked Gambas it was completely different from what VB6 was with the only similar things being having a vaguely BASIC-ish language and a form designer. If someone had a VB6 project that wanted to move it away from VB6 and didn't mind making a ton of changes to it, they'd most likely already be on VB.NET many years ago.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
kome 4y ago
computing was easier back then; why the trend has been reversed? very nice to have VB6 again.
- sph 4y ago
  It was so much easier being a teenager back in the day and learning to code a desktop app from scratch in a few weekends. Then you open FrontPage and make a simple website for it. Now it's black magic only approachable to $100/hr engineers.
  - pishpash 4y ago
    Because $100/hr engineers want to justify their existence.
    - eckza 4y ago
      Do you not think your own time is worth that much, if not more, given the mind-blowing amount of business value added by even the most horrible and unmaintainable pieces of software? Or are you saying that only midwits charge $100/hr, and that real engineers can and should charge much more, so anyone charging $100/hr is probably a hack? In the case of the former, here's an anecdote: when I was a baby junior, I was working on an in-house enterprise Windows Forms CRM application. We had a pricing manager that had taught himself enough C# to be dangerous. The code that the guy wrote was such a disaster that it conjured unspeakable horrors from the void. But because he understood the business domain at a level far deeper than anyone on the dev team, he could crank out forms and custom reports that turned misaligned curly-braces into cold, hard cash faster than any of us could say "DAMMIT MARK, YOU BROKE THE BUILD AGAIN". The lesson I took from that: turning ideas into code that creates business value isn't the hard part. The hard part is doing it in such a way that you don't create an unmaintainable mess that makes it impossible for the business to adapt to change so that it can continue to make money. In the case of the latter: I think I need to charge more.
      - pishpash 4y ago
webmobdev 4y ago
Interesting project - but unappealing because it's a subscription based service.
- blippage 4y ago
  > Enter your email As they say on Dragon's Den, "And for that reason I'm out."
  - hksoftware 4y ago
    temp-mail.org
    - blippage 4y ago
      Thanks. I'll check out the temporary mail thing. I still won't use it for the project, though. Anything that involves trying to get my personal info is an automatic "no". There's just no point me wasting my time. There's no end of programming languages out there, I'm not going to mess around with this one.
    - ydant 4y ago
      disclaimer: I'm not a shill for Fastmail, just a happy (family plan) user after Gmail did me the favor of changing pricing and having me look around for alternatives. $10/month is surprisingly high for temp-mail.org's service. Fastmail is $3-5/month paying monthly, and that includes full regular email service plus (at the $5/month level) your own domains, and on top of that they offer the disposable email address service. It seems like temp-mail's only extra feature is accepting cryptocurrency.
PostThisTooFast 4y ago
VBX controls were the thing that most closely fulfilled the promise of object-oriented programming: "off-the-shelf components that can be used to bolt an application together." Then there was WordBasic, a Word-specific implementation of Visual Basic that really kicked ass. You could build full applications in the word processor, to do tons of things we take for granted today.
netsharc 4y ago
The screenshots should be an app to track an IP address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU
- ninju 4y ago
  Haha...the right tool for the job!
KaiserPro 4y ago
For me VB6 was the pinnacle of GUI design/rapid prototyping. I know that many people are going to say I'm wrong and that VB6 was a cancer, but hear me out: o Drag and drop GUI designer o action oriented language o surprisingly advanced integrated IDE o It was easy, simple and reasonably fun to learn I know why QT/GTK and various other GUI systems use a HTML-y grid layout, but for me personally, I always struggle to make nice looking, well laid out, functional GUIs with them. just give me drag and drop, and ideally a python backend
- secondcoming 4y ago
  And the UI elements were all proper Win32 UI controls. I learned to program on VB6, and almost peed my pants when I got ownerdraw menus to work.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  I don' fully agree, only because I was rather on the other side of the fence with Delphi/C++ Builder. :) I always considered .NET a step backwards, versus doing something similar to what Borland was doing with Delphi/C++ Builder, meaning C# and VC++ should have provided better tooling based on COM, and then follow up with VB7. Ironically, when they tried to actually do that, with WinRT, they messed up the whole execution.
  - fwsgonzo 4y ago
    VB6 was the last "real" VB program before .NET obsoleted it. I used it for decades when I was young, and I have never again used anything that was as good, as simple, as precise and as feature-complete. Debugging in VB6 was incredible. An incredible feat that I'm not sure has been repeated since? Perhaps the debugging capabilities of MSVC has caught up these days, in which case, kudos to them. Maybe something exists today in the form of webdev? I wouldn't know as I'm stuck in the deep-end (backend). I have used .NET the last few years. I made a full desktop application for someone, and I also wrote a map/level editor for a game in it. I have to say that I like C# a lot, but I don't like the editor, I don't like the graphical construction source file, because it's so easy to break your GUI. And I also hated the fact that drawing was slow on .NET no matter how hard I tried to make it fast.
qwerty456127 4y ago
How is this better than actual VisualBasic?
- pishpash 4y ago
  Good question, you can run VB6 directly if you still have a copy.
  - eckza 4y ago
    > if you still have a copy I think you just answered your own question.
    - Siira 4y ago
      There are copies on the internet aplenty.
      - teh_klev 4y ago
        Each one carrying the risk of onboarding your PC into some miscreant's Command & Control system, or just plain encrypting your disks and making your life a misery. Good luck.
- Jaruzel 4y ago
  VB6 IDE doesn't play nice with Windows 10 anymore - There's a few glitches that make it irritating. On the upside msvbvm60.dll is still shipped with Windows 10 and 11, so a lot of VB6 apps will still just 'run'.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    Yeah, the VB6 IDE stutters and crashes horribly on just about any Windows after XP and Microsoft support documents suggests to not run it on anything more recent. So that means VMs at this point and XP being out of support too that means VMs that are network isolated as best as possible. Sure, the compiled apps still run fine, so at this point developer experience suffers a lot more compared to user experience and some users don't understand how much harder every day it is to work on VB6 codebases. (It's a bit of a horror hidden from users.) The VB6 IDE predates a lot of modern code navigation tools. The VB6 IDE predates common deployment of the mouse scroll wheel and scroll wheel support is provided by a cranky extension to the IDE that stutters awfully. I repeat: Scroll wheel support is broken by default in VB6 and there's an extension you can find on the web to install (if you can malware scan it and get it across your network isolation boundary to your XP VM) and it's still awful. Imagine trying to read thousands of lines ancient code without scroll wheel support. Might as well be on papyrus scrolls. The last version of git that supported XP is now pretty ancient and showing its age. Good luck setting up an XP build agent for VB6 IDE CI. Which it never supported anyway (the IDE never had a good CLI build tool). Developer experience of maintaining VB6 IDE apps in 2022 is pretty horrible and morale destroying.
rcarmo 4y ago
I keep hoping that someone would do something similar with Lua or Python, but I think that we reached peak OSS RAD with Gambas and Lazarus.
bitwize 4y ago
- georgia_peach 4y ago
  I think this is a perfectly valid comment. If it's not open source, we already have actual VB6, so what's the point?
  - forgotpwd16 4y ago
    VB6 hasn't been updated in 20 years and it's neither bug-free nor feature-complete.
    - georgia_peach 4y ago
      And RAD Basic, which doesn't even have a public download yet, is?
marcodiego 4y ago
How does it compares to Gambas BASIC?
marcodiego 4y ago
License?
- kencausey 4y ago
  Commercial
criddell 4y ago
It compiles to native Win32. Does that mean it can also compile to a dll that you can call from other languages like you could with VB6 (and still can with VB.net).
- sigzero 4y ago
  From the sparse docs: At this moment it is support only Standard EXE projects. In further versions, support for ActiveX Components (OCX), ActiveX EXE and ActiveX DLL will be added.
p2detar 4y ago
I owe significant portion of my Win32 dev skills to VB6. It allowed for working with the Win32 SDK by importing API calls from user32, kernel32, gdi32, etc. When I was still in high school, I used to hack GUI projects and games in the evenings. The culmination of that was a full blown space shooter game using DirectX7 [0] (still runs on Linux) and a TCP/IP chat + canvas draw application that I had installed in the computer room at my school. Fun times. 0 - https://github.com/kenamick/desktopdefender2 https://github.com/kenamick/desktopdefender2
- granatata 4y ago
  Good times. Finding and importing the Win32 apis was super easy. Also, if you needed more speed you could use inline assembly.
cies 4y ago
Not opensource programming language warning. I'd argue VB was worse because of it (and it's std lib) not being opensource at the time than because it was soooooo bad of a language... People cheer on HN for JS and PHP saying they are totally acceptable langs; then VB was (is) also totally acceptable. But VB required a payment upfront and whenever you needed to upgrade tools. This is not how the world liked it: pretty much all mainstream langs have opensource tools/stdlib/ecosystems nowadays. This project replaces proprietary with proprietary (as far as i can see); so to me it adds no value. In this space (RAD tool) I'm more interested in: https://www.lazarus-ide.org https://www.lazarus-ide.org
projektfu 4y ago
Error handling was terrible in VB, evidenced by the number of production VB apps that panic when clicking the wrong button or typing the wrong letters. Going from knowing enough to prototype to professional quality development was very hard. You could always tell a VB app. Controls don't line up, windows either prevent resizing or do so badly, lots of redraw flicker, varying visual styles, and crashes on seemingly benign user input. Database operations are often performed with no expectation of failure, the network is assumed to never have a problem, security policy is inconsistent, etc. Perhaps some blame can be laid at the learning materials that emphasize the happy path and treat errors as a separate subject. I hated VB and am so glad it is almost gone.
- cm2187 4y ago
  > You could always tell a VB app. Controls don't line up, windows either prevent resizing or do so badly, lots of redraw flicker, varying visual styles, and crashes on seemingly benign user input. You are describing 1998 VB as much as 2022 html+javascript
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    With the obvious joke (or sad fact) that VB6 apps used to run on, like, 64 MB RAM systems (or less, if you were targetting Windows CE and had that extended tooling in Visual Studio for it) - and today for your average Electron or whatever browser based "app" you need 4GB+ of RAM.
    - StillBored 4y ago
      64 MB RAM, not unusual for a high end desktop/dev machine in the late 1990's, but... VB6 (the last one) was 1998, same year as win98, which listed a 486+16M of ram as its system requirements. Which was a big step up from a W95 386 with 4M of ram. So one probably didn't want to run VB itself on those smaller machines, but the resulting apps definitely did, and those low end desktops were exactly what a lot of vb apps were running on.
  - victorvosk 4y ago
GartzenDeHaes 4y ago
One of VB's selling points was that you could call COM components written in C/C++, even if they weren't designed for VB. However, the opposite is also true. VB could create COM servers that could be used by any COM aware code. It was kind of gross integrating a VB component into a C/C++ application, but also kind of amazing that it worked.
- jsd1982 4y ago
  How is RAD Basic guaranteeing 100% VB6 compatibility _including_ COM components? You'd probably want a 32-bit Windows OS to execute that native code correctly. Are they doing some sort of emulation here or is it just completely not covered?
  - badsectoracula 4y ago
    32bit COM should work fine in 64bit Windows since it can run 32bit software - even classic VB. Obviously that would require a 32bit runtime. For a 64bit runtime they'd need either a 64bit version or only able to load 32bit out of process COM servers. AFAIK most COM stuff for VB was in-process (e.g. ActiveX controls) so those might be a problem but perhaps some sort of "32bit-to-64bit" bridge (via a separate 32bit process that communicates with the 64bit runtime) would work for the most part. I think a harder part would be libraries/COM/extensions/whatever that access/modify the VB6 runtime internals.
- skeeter2020 4y ago
  I sold COM components written in VB6 as a relatively new grad, and still remember my first support issue for someone who was consuming in C++. It was stressful and the solution ugly but we got it working!
shirogane86x 4y ago
I see a lot of people expressing love and nostalgia for like VB6 and stuff but to be honest... maybe it's me being younger and not having experienced VB during its prime, but when I got to work with VB6 and VB.NET it was a _nightmare_. I can see that the tooling might've been great and all, but the language is seriously just horrible. And as for VB.NET, my experience was that the bearable parts were the ones it inherited from the .NET and C#. It might've been fine for prototypes, but at least IME prototypes never stay that, they get swamped with features and a few years down the line you have a Frankenstein's monster of badly thought out features struggling to interact with each other... except with VB, all of that is mixed in a soup of On Error Resume Next. I don't really see how anyone would put up with that in 2022
- aspaviento 4y ago
  And don't forget the lost battle that is to try to keep a clean git history in VB6 with words changing the leading letter from uppercase to lowercase and viceversa or all the form properties jumping around whenever you touch the preview of the GUI (ie. Switching to a different tab).
  - shoozza 4y ago
    Adding all the words to the top of each file[0] and saving every file resolved it for me. Just need to pay attention to not change the casing when modifing/adding code. [0] https://github.com/Soldat/polyworks/blob/37aaf471646fe4773e641e269e3ff23323b1e6cd/frmTaskBar.frm#L26 https://github.com/Soldat/polyworks/blob/37aaf471646fe4773e6...
- wvenable 4y ago
  > I can see that the tooling might've been great and all, but the language is seriously just horrible. The language wasn't that bad. Classes without inheritance -- that's the new hotness these days! Since you lumped in VB.NET in there you're definitely past the prime era and oddly I agree that VB.NET is horrible while I still think VB, for the time, was perfectly reasonable. It certainly has less gotchas than JavaScript.
pcdoodle 4y ago
Fun story about "field programming" VB6 as a young startup: Customer wanted pandora over the restaurant speakers, "No problemo, I got an aux to RCA in the car". Customer likes free music, now wants front entry intercom mic to talk to customers over stereo system. No problemo, Google VB6 volume mixer. One line of my LPT port sniffing code added, Boom! insert paper clip into a few pins on the LPT port and solder to 50ft. cable, then soldered to pads on freshly wall mounted mouse (IBM TWO BUTTON WHITE THING), so it can short the pins on LPT, mute WaveOut and unmute wall mounted microphone (ALSO WHITE THING WITH THAT CRT PIVOT MOUNT) on 50' aux extender. I think I only charged $40.00/hr for that kinda stuff back then...
EGreg 4y ago
Does it run on Web? On Windows? What platform stack is it
egypturnash 4y ago
That RB icon prominently featured in this page feels like the precise opposite of what something called “Rad Basic” should have. “Rad Basic” demands some X-TREME graphic choices IMHO. I think I blame living through the nineties for this feeling.
- sigzero 4y ago
  Yeah, for being RAD(!)...it kinda isn't. lol
  - egypturnash 4y ago
    I just keep imagining a neon green crocodile wearing a backwards baseball cap while surfing on a keyboard, with a big RB! on their shirt in a paint-splattery font. Maybe a little hard to fit all that on a toolbar-scaled icon. Just RB! in paint-splat neon green would go a long way to increasing the RAD FACTOR though. :)
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Apparently "RAD" is some old acronym that means "Rapid Application Development". I'd never seen it until a few years ago when I ran into Embarcadero RAD Builder.
jimmar 4y ago
I loved how quickly VB6 applications started. Waiting for .NET applications to start felt like a huge step backward. In my first job out of college, I can pinpoint the exact moment when I won my boss' respect when I fixed a long-standing bug in a VB6 application. VB6 will always have a special place in my heart.
AndrewSChapman 4y ago
The closest experience I've had to VB in a more modern context is B4J: https://www.b4x.com/b4j.html https://www.b4x.com/b4j.html Visual designer, integrated IDE and debugger, basic language, very similar philosophy, cross platform (thanks to using the JVM as the compile target). Unfortunately however you do need Windows to author which is not me these days. As tools for making little apps or rapid prototyping it's quite decent.
rkeene2 4y ago
For a cross-platform VB-like (though closer to VB3 than VB6) tool there's vTcl [0]. [0] http://vtcl.sourceforge.net/ http://vtcl.sourceforge.net/
rlv-dan 4y ago
Does it support unicode? That's the biggest issue for my applications (which I still sell)
zubairq 4y ago
I based yazz.com , a low code tool on Visual Basic 6. I never aimed for compatibility though, and made it a web app which was docker compatible instead
aaronbrethorst 4y ago
Cool project. Typo at the bottom of the home page: "loosing compatibility" should be "losing compatibility"

221 points by maxbaines 4y ago

robbiep 4y ago

That’s quite cool. I have such fond memories of (post qbasic) learning to program in VB

jll29 4y ago

Mac/Linux ports?

kinard 4y ago
If you want a x-platform VB like RAD take a look at XOJO.
- ben_w 4y ago
  That brings back memories. I got a copy of that when it was called REALbasic and distributed on MacFormat magazine cover CDs. Sufficiently compatible with VB that I wrote some coursework on it for a teacher who only knew VB.
  - avidphantasm 4y ago
    It looks like Xojo is based on REALbasic as http://www.realsoftware.com/ http://www.realsoftware.com/ redirects to https://www.xojo.com/ https://www.xojo.com/.
    - garrypettet 4y ago
      Yeah they renamed it maybe 10 years ago (it’s pronounced Zo Joe). It’s a fast compiled BASIC like OOP language that runs natively on x86 and ARM.
- garrypettet 4y ago
  I’ve been a happy user of Xojo (formally RealBasic) for about 20 years. It’s really powerful and free to use when getting started. I really like the all-in-one IDE and the ability to cross compile for macOS, Windows and Linux. Their desktop support is pretty good. Their iOS and web support not such much however. I think it’s a shame they are not more well known
qalmakka 4y ago
I wouldn't hold my breath. The original VB6 was chock-full of COM+ and lots of Windows specific stuff. I would rather attempt to migrate VB6 projects to Gambas (http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html) which is a modern FOSS take on (Visual) Basic. It's well maintained and runs pretty much everywhere.
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  Last time i checked Gambas it was completely different from what VB6 was with the only similar things being having a vaguely BASIC-ish language and a form designer. If someone had a VB6 project that wanted to move it away from VB6 and didn't mind making a ton of changes to it, they'd most likely already be on VB.NET many years ago.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

kome 4y ago

computing was easier back then; why the trend has been reversed? very nice to have VB6 again.

sph 4y ago
It was so much easier being a teenager back in the day and learning to code a desktop app from scratch in a few weekends. Then you open FrontPage and make a simple website for it. Now it's black magic only approachable to $100/hr engineers.
- pishpash 4y ago
  Because $100/hr engineers want to justify their existence.
  - eckza 4y ago
    Do you not think your own time is worth that much, if not more, given the mind-blowing amount of business value added by even the most horrible and unmaintainable pieces of software? Or are you saying that only midwits charge $100/hr, and that real engineers can and should charge much more, so anyone charging $100/hr is probably a hack? In the case of the former, here's an anecdote: when I was a baby junior, I was working on an in-house enterprise Windows Forms CRM application. We had a pricing manager that had taught himself enough C# to be dangerous. The code that the guy wrote was such a disaster that it conjured unspeakable horrors from the void. But because he understood the business domain at a level far deeper than anyone on the dev team, he could crank out forms and custom reports that turned misaligned curly-braces into cold, hard cash faster than any of us could say "DAMMIT MARK, YOU BROKE THE BUILD AGAIN". The lesson I took from that: turning ideas into code that creates business value isn't the hard part. The hard part is doing it in such a way that you don't create an unmaintainable mess that makes it impossible for the business to adapt to change so that it can continue to make money. In the case of the latter: I think I need to charge more.
    - pishpash 4y ago

webmobdev 4y ago

Interesting project - but unappealing because it's a subscription based service.

blippage 4y ago
> Enter your email As they say on Dragon's Den, "And for that reason I'm out."
- hksoftware 4y ago
  temp-mail.org
  - blippage 4y ago
    Thanks. I'll check out the temporary mail thing. I still won't use it for the project, though. Anything that involves trying to get my personal info is an automatic "no". There's just no point me wasting my time. There's no end of programming languages out there, I'm not going to mess around with this one.
  - ydant 4y ago
    disclaimer: I'm not a shill for Fastmail, just a happy (family plan) user after Gmail did me the favor of changing pricing and having me look around for alternatives. $10/month is surprisingly high for temp-mail.org's service. Fastmail is $3-5/month paying monthly, and that includes full regular email service plus (at the $5/month level) your own domains, and on top of that they offer the disposable email address service. It seems like temp-mail's only extra feature is accepting cryptocurrency.

PostThisTooFast 4y ago

VBX controls were the thing that most closely fulfilled the promise of object-oriented programming: "off-the-shelf components that can be used to bolt an application together." Then there was WordBasic, a Word-specific implementation of Visual Basic that really kicked ass. You could build full applications in the word processor, to do tons of things we take for granted today.

netsharc 4y ago

The screenshots should be an app to track an IP address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU

ninju 4y ago
Haha...the right tool for the job!

KaiserPro 4y ago

For me VB6 was the pinnacle of GUI design/rapid prototyping. I know that many people are going to say I'm wrong and that VB6 was a cancer, but hear me out: o Drag and drop GUI designer o action oriented language o surprisingly advanced integrated IDE o It was easy, simple and reasonably fun to learn I know why QT/GTK and various other GUI systems use a HTML-y grid layout, but for me personally, I always struggle to make nice looking, well laid out, functional GUIs with them. just give me drag and drop, and ideally a python backend

secondcoming 4y ago
And the UI elements were all proper Win32 UI controls. I learned to program on VB6, and almost peed my pants when I got ownerdraw menus to work.
pjmlp 4y ago
I don' fully agree, only because I was rather on the other side of the fence with Delphi/C++ Builder. :) I always considered .NET a step backwards, versus doing something similar to what Borland was doing with Delphi/C++ Builder, meaning C# and VC++ should have provided better tooling based on COM, and then follow up with VB7. Ironically, when they tried to actually do that, with WinRT, they messed up the whole execution.
- fwsgonzo 4y ago
  VB6 was the last "real" VB program before .NET obsoleted it. I used it for decades when I was young, and I have never again used anything that was as good, as simple, as precise and as feature-complete. Debugging in VB6 was incredible. An incredible feat that I'm not sure has been repeated since? Perhaps the debugging capabilities of MSVC has caught up these days, in which case, kudos to them. Maybe something exists today in the form of webdev? I wouldn't know as I'm stuck in the deep-end (backend). I have used .NET the last few years. I made a full desktop application for someone, and I also wrote a map/level editor for a game in it. I have to say that I like C# a lot, but I don't like the editor, I don't like the graphical construction source file, because it's so easy to break your GUI. And I also hated the fact that drawing was slow on .NET no matter how hard I tried to make it fast.

qwerty456127 4y ago

How is this better than actual VisualBasic?

pishpash 4y ago
Good question, you can run VB6 directly if you still have a copy.
- eckza 4y ago
  > if you still have a copy I think you just answered your own question.
  - Siira 4y ago
    There are copies on the internet aplenty.
    - teh_klev 4y ago
      Each one carrying the risk of onboarding your PC into some miscreant's Command & Control system, or just plain encrypting your disks and making your life a misery. Good luck.
Jaruzel 4y ago
VB6 IDE doesn't play nice with Windows 10 anymore - There's a few glitches that make it irritating. On the upside msvbvm60.dll is still shipped with Windows 10 and 11, so a lot of VB6 apps will still just 'run'.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  Yeah, the VB6 IDE stutters and crashes horribly on just about any Windows after XP and Microsoft support documents suggests to not run it on anything more recent. So that means VMs at this point and XP being out of support too that means VMs that are network isolated as best as possible. Sure, the compiled apps still run fine, so at this point developer experience suffers a lot more compared to user experience and some users don't understand how much harder every day it is to work on VB6 codebases. (It's a bit of a horror hidden from users.) The VB6 IDE predates a lot of modern code navigation tools. The VB6 IDE predates common deployment of the mouse scroll wheel and scroll wheel support is provided by a cranky extension to the IDE that stutters awfully. I repeat: Scroll wheel support is broken by default in VB6 and there's an extension you can find on the web to install (if you can malware scan it and get it across your network isolation boundary to your XP VM) and it's still awful. Imagine trying to read thousands of lines ancient code without scroll wheel support. Might as well be on papyrus scrolls. The last version of git that supported XP is now pretty ancient and showing its age. Good luck setting up an XP build agent for VB6 IDE CI. Which it never supported anyway (the IDE never had a good CLI build tool). Developer experience of maintaining VB6 IDE apps in 2022 is pretty horrible and morale destroying.

rcarmo 4y ago

I keep hoping that someone would do something similar with Lua or Python, but I think that we reached peak OSS RAD with Gambas and Lazarus.

bitwize 4y ago

georgia_peach 4y ago
I think this is a perfectly valid comment. If it's not open source, we already have actual VB6, so what's the point?
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  VB6 hasn't been updated in 20 years and it's neither bug-free nor feature-complete.
  - georgia_peach 4y ago
    And RAD Basic, which doesn't even have a public download yet, is?

marcodiego 4y ago

How does it compares to Gambas BASIC?

marcodiego 4y ago

License?

kencausey 4y ago
Commercial

criddell 4y ago

It compiles to native Win32. Does that mean it can also compile to a dll that you can call from other languages like you could with VB6 (and still can with VB.net).

sigzero 4y ago
From the sparse docs: At this moment it is support only Standard EXE projects. In further versions, support for ActiveX Components (OCX), ActiveX EXE and ActiveX DLL will be added.

p2detar 4y ago

I owe significant portion of my Win32 dev skills to VB6. It allowed for working with the Win32 SDK by importing API calls from user32, kernel32, gdi32, etc. When I was still in high school, I used to hack GUI projects and games in the evenings. The culmination of that was a full blown space shooter game using DirectX7 [0] (still runs on Linux) and a TCP/IP chat + canvas draw application that I had installed in the computer room at my school. Fun times. 0 - https://github.com/kenamick/desktopdefender2 https://github.com/kenamick/desktopdefender2

granatata 4y ago
Good times. Finding and importing the Win32 apis was super easy. Also, if you needed more speed you could use inline assembly.

cies 4y ago

Not opensource programming language warning. I'd argue VB was worse because of it (and it's std lib) not being opensource at the time than because it was soooooo bad of a language... People cheer on HN for JS and PHP saying they are totally acceptable langs; then VB was (is) also totally acceptable. But VB required a payment upfront and whenever you needed to upgrade tools. This is not how the world liked it: pretty much all mainstream langs have opensource tools/stdlib/ecosystems nowadays. This project replaces proprietary with proprietary (as far as i can see); so to me it adds no value. In this space (RAD tool) I'm more interested in: https://www.lazarus-ide.org https://www.lazarus-ide.org

projektfu 4y ago

Error handling was terrible in VB, evidenced by the number of production VB apps that panic when clicking the wrong button or typing the wrong letters. Going from knowing enough to prototype to professional quality development was very hard. You could always tell a VB app. Controls don't line up, windows either prevent resizing or do so badly, lots of redraw flicker, varying visual styles, and crashes on seemingly benign user input. Database operations are often performed with no expectation of failure, the network is assumed to never have a problem, security policy is inconsistent, etc. Perhaps some blame can be laid at the learning materials that emphasize the happy path and treat errors as a separate subject. I hated VB and am so glad it is almost gone.

cm2187 4y ago
> You could always tell a VB app. Controls don't line up, windows either prevent resizing or do so badly, lots of redraw flicker, varying visual styles, and crashes on seemingly benign user input. You are describing 1998 VB as much as 2022 html+javascript
- mschuster91 4y ago
  With the obvious joke (or sad fact) that VB6 apps used to run on, like, 64 MB RAM systems (or less, if you were targetting Windows CE and had that extended tooling in Visual Studio for it) - and today for your average Electron or whatever browser based "app" you need 4GB+ of RAM.
  - StillBored 4y ago
    64 MB RAM, not unusual for a high end desktop/dev machine in the late 1990's, but... VB6 (the last one) was 1998, same year as win98, which listed a 486+16M of ram as its system requirements. Which was a big step up from a W95 386 with 4M of ram. So one probably didn't want to run VB itself on those smaller machines, but the resulting apps definitely did, and those low end desktops were exactly what a lot of vb apps were running on.
- victorvosk 4y ago

GartzenDeHaes 4y ago

One of VB's selling points was that you could call COM components written in C/C++, even if they weren't designed for VB. However, the opposite is also true. VB could create COM servers that could be used by any COM aware code. It was kind of gross integrating a VB component into a C/C++ application, but also kind of amazing that it worked.

jsd1982 4y ago
How is RAD Basic guaranteeing 100% VB6 compatibility _including_ COM components? You'd probably want a 32-bit Windows OS to execute that native code correctly. Are they doing some sort of emulation here or is it just completely not covered?
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  32bit COM should work fine in 64bit Windows since it can run 32bit software - even classic VB. Obviously that would require a 32bit runtime. For a 64bit runtime they'd need either a 64bit version or only able to load 32bit out of process COM servers. AFAIK most COM stuff for VB was in-process (e.g. ActiveX controls) so those might be a problem but perhaps some sort of "32bit-to-64bit" bridge (via a separate 32bit process that communicates with the 64bit runtime) would work for the most part. I think a harder part would be libraries/COM/extensions/whatever that access/modify the VB6 runtime internals.
skeeter2020 4y ago
I sold COM components written in VB6 as a relatively new grad, and still remember my first support issue for someone who was consuming in C++. It was stressful and the solution ugly but we got it working!

shirogane86x 4y ago

I see a lot of people expressing love and nostalgia for like VB6 and stuff but to be honest... maybe it's me being younger and not having experienced VB during its prime, but when I got to work with VB6 and VB.NET it was a _nightmare_. I can see that the tooling might've been great and all, but the language is seriously just horrible. And as for VB.NET, my experience was that the bearable parts were the ones it inherited from the .NET and C#. It might've been fine for prototypes, but at least IME prototypes never stay that, they get swamped with features and a few years down the line you have a Frankenstein's monster of badly thought out features struggling to interact with each other... except with VB, all of that is mixed in a soup of On Error Resume Next. I don't really see how anyone would put up with that in 2022

aspaviento 4y ago
And don't forget the lost battle that is to try to keep a clean git history in VB6 with words changing the leading letter from uppercase to lowercase and viceversa or all the form properties jumping around whenever you touch the preview of the GUI (ie. Switching to a different tab).
- shoozza 4y ago
  Adding all the words to the top of each file[0] and saving every file resolved it for me. Just need to pay attention to not change the casing when modifing/adding code. [0] https://github.com/Soldat/polyworks/blob/37aaf471646fe4773e641e269e3ff23323b1e6cd/frmTaskBar.frm#L26 https://github.com/Soldat/polyworks/blob/37aaf471646fe4773e6...
wvenable 4y ago
> I can see that the tooling might've been great and all, but the language is seriously just horrible. The language wasn't that bad. Classes without inheritance -- that's the new hotness these days! Since you lumped in VB.NET in there you're definitely past the prime era and oddly I agree that VB.NET is horrible while I still think VB, for the time, was perfectly reasonable. It certainly has less gotchas than JavaScript.

pcdoodle 4y ago

Fun story about "field programming" VB6 as a young startup: Customer wanted pandora over the restaurant speakers, "No problemo, I got an aux to RCA in the car". Customer likes free music, now wants front entry intercom mic to talk to customers over stereo system. No problemo, Google VB6 volume mixer. One line of my LPT port sniffing code added, Boom! insert paper clip into a few pins on the LPT port and solder to 50ft. cable, then soldered to pads on freshly wall mounted mouse (IBM TWO BUTTON WHITE THING), so it can short the pins on LPT, mute WaveOut and unmute wall mounted microphone (ALSO WHITE THING WITH THAT CRT PIVOT MOUNT) on 50' aux extender. I think I only charged $40.00/hr for that kinda stuff back then...

EGreg 4y ago

Does it run on Web? On Windows? What platform stack is it

egypturnash 4y ago

That RB icon prominently featured in this page feels like the precise opposite of what something called “Rad Basic” should have. “Rad Basic” demands some X-TREME graphic choices IMHO. I think I blame living through the nineties for this feeling.

sigzero 4y ago
Yeah, for being RAD(!)...it kinda isn't. lol
- egypturnash 4y ago
  I just keep imagining a neon green crocodile wearing a backwards baseball cap while surfing on a keyboard, with a big RB! on their shirt in a paint-splattery font. Maybe a little hard to fit all that on a toolbar-scaled icon. Just RB! in paint-splat neon green would go a long way to increasing the RAD FACTOR though. :)
phendrenad2 4y ago
Apparently "RAD" is some old acronym that means "Rapid Application Development". I'd never seen it until a few years ago when I ran into Embarcadero RAD Builder.

jimmar 4y ago

I loved how quickly VB6 applications started. Waiting for .NET applications to start felt like a huge step backward. In my first job out of college, I can pinpoint the exact moment when I won my boss' respect when I fixed a long-standing bug in a VB6 application. VB6 will always have a special place in my heart.

AndrewSChapman 4y ago

The closest experience I've had to VB in a more modern context is B4J: https://www.b4x.com/b4j.html https://www.b4x.com/b4j.html Visual designer, integrated IDE and debugger, basic language, very similar philosophy, cross platform (thanks to using the JVM as the compile target). Unfortunately however you do need Windows to author which is not me these days. As tools for making little apps or rapid prototyping it's quite decent.

rkeene2 4y ago

For a cross-platform VB-like (though closer to VB3 than VB6) tool there's vTcl [0]. [0] http://vtcl.sourceforge.net/ http://vtcl.sourceforge.net/

rlv-dan 4y ago

Does it support unicode? That's the biggest issue for my applications (which I still sell)

zubairq 4y ago

I based yazz.com , a low code tool on Visual Basic 6. I never aimed for compatibility though, and made it a web app which was docker compatible instead

aaronbrethorst 4y ago

Cool project. Typo at the bottom of the home page: "loosing compatibility" should be "losing compatibility"