15 ms·

Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

240 points by ethanpil 2y ago

stef-13013 2y ago
It does the job, so "Who Cares?"
andsoitis 2y ago
I recently discovered Remobjects and their development tools. Amongst other things, they create Mercury, with they describe as a modern Visual Basic that can compile for: - .Net - JVM - Android (JDK and NDK) - iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS - Windows - Linux - WebAssembly https://www.remobjects.com/elements/mercury/ https://www.remobjects.com/elements/mercury/
- pryelluw 2y ago
  Feels weird to pay for this. I’m definitely spoiled by open source tooling.
  - benatkin 2y ago
    With Moonbit and Wolfram Language, it feels like a renaissance of paid programming languages.
    - forgotpwd16 2y ago
      Wolfram ie Mathematica language predates VB1. Being commercial was the norm back then, and due to its academia widespread use has remained as such.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - tonyedgecombe 2y ago
    I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand it's great that people can write software without any financial friction, on the other I think developers should be rewarded for their work and I have little doubt the remote objects tools wouldn't exist without some kind of commercial reward.
- neverartful 2y ago
  Yes, Remobjects makes some nice tools. I absolutely adore their Oxygene language.
- dr_kiszonka 2y ago
  Is there any documentation or tutorial on how to create a cross platform mobile app using any of their languages? The value proposition is great, but I can't find any actual code.
  - neverartful 2y ago
    Have a look at their github repos. They have a fair bit of sample code sprinkled about.
benatkin 2y ago
They should have written Dogecoin in VB, then it would have been even sillier.
KetoManx64 2y ago
I used XYPlorer for about 5-6 years until I made the switch to using Linux on all my machines last year. The scripting, speed, dual panes, customization, portability between machines (i used Syncthing to sync my configs between 3 machines) on XyPlorer are phenomenal and I've sadly not been able to find a Linux native file manager that's at the same level. Dolphin comes close but even with qdbus commands it sadly not as customizable as XYPlorer. I think it's the one thing I miss the most about Windows.
- captn3m0 2y ago
  My one thing was “Everything by Voidtools”. It piggy backed on the NTFS index, something no tool does for Linux-native filesystems. Does XYPlorer work with Wine?
  - pacifika 2y ago
    http://cboxdoerfer.github.io/fsearch/ http://cboxdoerfer.github.io/fsearch/ FSearch is a Linux alternative.
  - forgotpwd16 2y ago
    >Linux-native filesystems Because they lack something (for worse or better depending on one's requirements) equivalent to NTFS' MFT & USN Journal. Closest is building own file db by first-time full scan and then updating via fanotify/inotify. This is what FSearch tool does.
    - vdm 2y ago
      http://cboxdoerfer.github.io/fsearch/ http://cboxdoerfer.github.io/fsearch/
- jlahijani 2y ago
  I've used XYplorer daily since 2008. It's a fantastic piece of software and updated all the time. Wish there were something comparable in Linux.
RajT88 2y ago
Early in my career, I worked in support for a company which made developer tooling. Male programmers would call in and do a bit of intro so you knew they were not dumb, just busy. VB6 programmers would say things like "I am a very senior VB developer". They were the only "very senior" programmers who did not seem to understand things about OS stuff. Like exported functions and their different calling conventions, why you need to "register" COM .dlls, environment blocks, handles, etc.
- j16sdiz 2y ago
  > They were the only "very senior" programmers... Don't forget nodejs.
  - noduerme 2y ago
    Really? I feel like those of us maintaining PHP stacks are much more "senior" by now...
- treve 2y ago
  I feel this narrative about less experienced developers probably made sense to you back then, but it might be time to update it!
  - RajT88 2y ago
    This narrative was about how VB did not produce senior developers that understood how computers worked. Never observed such a thing with any other language. (Of course I am too young to have met people building business apps off COBOL or BASIC).
    - treve 2y ago
      There's still lots of gatekeeping everywhere if you know where to look!
- flomo 2y ago
  Point taken that VB was a programming ghetto. But the actual seniors were fighting the language to call Win32, writing MTS servers, and etc, they 'got' all that stuff. I did some VBS ASP back in the day (not VB), and the language was more just annoying, at least partially due to the BASIC legacy stuff. Like it didn't even have a hashmap, you had to import something from Internet Explorer.
pyeri 2y ago
Both VB6 and FreePascal/Delphi are highly capable tools even in today's context, they just need more marketing.
- ianhawes 2y ago
  > VB6 highly capable > VB6 only available in 32-bit
  - trinix912 2y ago
    I really don't see how this invalidates the statement, regarding that VB's primary domain is rapid CRUD application development. Those applications usually don't use >2GBs of RAM, at least from what I've seen working on several old ones written in VB6, Delphi, PowerBuilder... Is a 64-bit Electron CRUD app that much more capable/better in getting the job done than a 32-bit VB6 equivalent? Both are merely an SQL client in the end.
- _blk 2y ago
  Yeah, I used VB5 as one of my first languages and today did half a day of VBA. Definitely enough to quickly make me want to raise my hourly rate. Esp. in that office macro editor. Btw and totally unrelated office can now interpret VBA, (office)TypeScript and Python. Did I miss any?
- mardifoufs 2y ago
  Delphi, maybe, sure. But starting a new project with vb6 is just weird unless it's the only language someone is familiar with. It's a dead end, even on the only platform where it makes sense to use it.
- unscaled 2y ago
  FreePascal/Delphi and VB6 are entirely different beasts. For one, FreePascal and Delphi are still under development. Delphi had the following language features added since 1998 (this is just a small selection): Extension methods/properties ("class helpers"), generics, enum types, for..in loops, static methods, closures, smart pointers, value types ("records"[1]), attributes, variables can be declared anywhere (removing Pascal's limitation), type inference, multiline strings. Besides all of this, modern Delphi can compile code for Windows, Linux and Mac, as well as Android and iOS. It seems like there's even a cross-platform library for writing apps that can run on both Mobile and Desktop called FireMonkey. VB6, on the other hand, is a language frozen in time. It never supported any other platform than 32-bit Windows[2]. It only really works on the new Microsoft Surface Laptops thanks to emulation, but I can also run Nintendo 8-bit games on a Surface Pro 11 using an emulator — that doesn't say much. Unicode support is also a mess. VB6 always used Unicode internally, but this was implementing during the UCS-2 heyday (so you need hacks to use Emoji for instance). Worse yet, is that VB6 was never really designed to run natively on Windows NT, so it's mostly using using the XxxYyyA family of APIs instead of the XxxYyyW family of APIs. This means that you can only display text in a non-English writing if your system's ANSI codpeage is set to that language (in the past you had to restart Windows to change this, not sure if it has improved). To make things worse, some languages (from countries that were too pair to get ANSI pages in Microsoft during the 1990s). So no Ethiopian languages or Mongolian as the author claims. Windows ANSI codpeages also do not "fully support" Japanese and Chinese as the author claims. Over the years the governments of Japan, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong have updated their national standards (which defined tables of characters that should be digitally encodable) and introduced more characters that were previously not mapped. These characters were not new or fake[3] — they were just less common, but still in use. All of these various government standards (like JIS X 0213, GB 18030, Big5-2003) got quickly incorporated into newer versions of Unicode, but the Windows ANSI codepages stagnated and they don't support some of the characters in these codepages. I'm not sure how it's going to affect VB6, but I'm pretty sure that some Unicode CJK characters would just not map into ANSI and would not be displayed even if your system code page is set correctly. With all of these things considered, no developer who cares about their users should choose VB6 for writing a modern app. I'd also argue that no developer who cares about themselves would do that. VB6 wasn't a great language to begin with. It was better than VB3, but it was still inferior to Delphi even when it was out. Customizing the UI beyond the basics, often needed custom ActiveX components written in C++ or messing around with a lot of raw Windows API calls. Error handling was very painful too. It was never a great developer experience even back of the day if you wanted to do anything beyond the basics. --- [1] To be fair, Borland's Pascal dialects had value types support since they've implemented object oriented programming (that came in either Turbo Pascal 5.5 or 6.0, I don't exactly remember). Turbo Pascal "objects" could be put on the stack or as pointers like in C++. They even had destructors that would be invoked automatically when the object went out-of-scope, again like C++'s RAII. But the old "objects" kinda botched polymorphism (I don't even remember the details), so when Delphi came out they've been replaced with "classes" that are Reference-only (like Java, but initially without any form of automatic memory management). [2] VBA was originally ported to Mac, but it is not exactly the same language, lacks the GUI designer and can't run most VB6 apps [3] In most cases, at least: https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html
tombert 2y ago
I debated writing an app in ColdFusion (well OpenBluedragon or Railo or something) about a year ago, partly out of curiosity to how well it holds up, but mostly out of sentimentality for the language. I had a bit of trouble getting started, and eventually the project morphed less into web and more into data-processing so I ended up using Java, but I still occasionally get the urge to write using a “dead” language.
silisili 2y ago
VB3 was my first real intro to programming. Well, I started with C++ but abandoned it as an impatient child as describing a window in code wasn't fun. I wish we had a new drag and drop WYSIWYG to get people interested. Put Python or Go or even Basic behind it. QT maybe? Heck make it Electron. I'm not sure I would be where I am today without VB having existed, and it's a shame kids today don't have the same tools available.
- xtracto 2y ago
  Have a look at Gambas3 [1] it kind of continued where Vb6 stopped. It's super useful for quick GUI based software. [1] https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html# https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html#
  - graemep 2y ago
    Gambas is Linux (and presumably Unix) only, right? A VB6 substitute that does not run on Windows seems very niche.
- profsummergig 2y ago
  Even a tool like Frontpage was a game changer. Simple website in a minute without any need to know HTML. No free tool that does that today. Dreamweaver does, but it's paid.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - cfn 2y ago
    That's how I learned HTML, building the page in Frontpage and then looking at the markup. I don't remember it being free though.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      It was very easy to get from the usual “alternative” software sources.
giancarlostoro 2y ago
Microsoft has open sourced so much, I wish they would work on an effort to fully open source VB6 at least the bits they fully own and control. I have a feeling the community might rally to fill in the gaps, even if its over a few years. I mean, look at EverQuest Online, insanely old MMO client, still has people building private servers, and even clients.
actuallyalys 2y ago
I don't think being written in VB6 is actually a good reason not to use XYPlorer, which seems like a capable tool, but this page doesn't seem really reassuring? What would reassure me is knowing that there is a maintained version of VB6 for modern systems. Luckily, there apparently is such an implementation, twinBasic, and they are already using it for 64-bit releases.
draw_down 2y ago
[dead]
ryukoposting 2y ago
I think VB is totally fine. It's a pragmatic solution to a real problem, and the ugliest things about it today are all a product of hindsight. On the other hand, this rubs me the wrong way: > So, wouldn’t it be logical to conclude: If such an application can be written in VB6 then VB6 cannot be that bad after all? Yes, it absolutely could be bad. Our industry consists, in no small part, of turd polishing. Plenty of good software is written in bad (or ill-fitted) languages, and vice versa.
- jeswin 2y ago
  > Plenty of good software is written in bad (or ill-fitted) languages, and vice versa. That's because you mention VB6 as a language. VB6 is not about the language, but about the platform and vertical integration; from the IDE to the app to the distribution. It was magical that dropping a telephony component into a form enabled the form to make phone calls. Or you could drag-drop a Web Browser component, and have a browser inside your app. Or a database component, and a thousand other things. Few of these required reading the docs. There are many apps that can be written (and deployed!) faster in legacy VB than with anything available today.
  - chii 2y ago
    > It was magical that dropping a telephony component into a form enabled the form to make phone calls the magic of COM[0]! But when it crashed it crashed hard. And the underlying programming model (beyond just using premade ones) are a bit hard to grok and fraught with footguns that shoot not only yourself, but the OS as well. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model
    - unscaled 2y ago
      And COM/OLE/ActiveX components (whatever Microsoft fancied calling them that year) could have been used just as easily from Delphi. And you don't even need COM. You could do the same things today with RAD components in, say, Java. But it's just no longer a fad. Programmers nowadays don't think that dragging a component that makes phone calls and linking it to a button. Nowadays, they would just write "npm install telephony" and then add a couple of lines that they got from the README.md on GitHub (or from their AI assistant) to make a call: import { Dialer } from "telephony"; const dialer = new Dialer(); dialer.call("+1 800 1234 1234");
rkagerer 2y ago
Works on Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11 That's better than you can say for a lot of software these days
- nolok 2y ago
  It's a feature of limiting yourself to the win32 api (and functions of it available since 2001 only). Eg the moment you need to deal with security like certificate or whatever this goes out the window.
  - layer8 2y ago
    You can always program it to be conditional on the runtime environment.
  - rkagerer 2y ago
    In some ways I wish they just kept building on that API instead of introducing lots of competing (or complimentary, depending on your viewpoint) frameworks and philosophies.
  - fafalone 2y ago
    Plenty VB6 apps use tons of APIs introduced well beyond 2001. I'm not too familiar with XYPlorer but it looks like it will support some more recent stuff if available. One of my hobbies was writing demo projects showing the use of new APIs and COM objects. I have a shell browsing control with all of the features of Explorer; it for example can browse attached media devices like cameras and phones that don't even have normal file system paths and can't be used in older apps, because it's based entirely around shell interfaces and APIs not available until Vista. Another recent project was how to use the Win7+ Ribbon UI controls. I don't support earlier Windows versions than 7 at all in my personal projects now. Security or certificates? No problem. I've written VB6 compatible versions of the entire BCrypt and NCrypt APIs covering everything up through the latest SDK, and people have written practical programs using those plus tons of other Windows security, crypto, and cert subsystems. There's connection classes using the newest TLS versions. OAuth? Sure. People are replacing older in-app browsers with WebView2-based ones. If that's still insufficient, and you really want something more modern, it's entirely possible and there's plenty of demos of using WinRT from VB6 and twinBASIC. XAML controls? Yup, people are doing it. We just had a big debate about the merits of using the latest Windows 11 RichEdit controls supporting color fonts directly vs using the XAML implementation instead, or implementing a windowless RichEdit with the modern Direct2D rendering pathway like the XAML one does underneath. Speaking of DirectX, there's also VB/tB compatible libraries for Direct3D 11 and 12 and the Media Foundation subsystem. Just because a language is 'frozen' in 1998 doesn't mean it can't call modern APIs and use modern libraries. And now with twinBASIC it's unfrozen, adding tons of new language features and modernizations. Do you also think modern apps absolutely need the very latest C++ standards and you can't make modern apps in C++ 03? Hell, I've even written demos of how to use tB to make kernel mode drivers that run on Win10/11, inspired by someone figuring out how to make one in VB6 that runs on Windows up through the last 32bit version. Since tB supports 64bit, they run on 64bit 10/11 now.
29athrowaway 2y ago
You can use GAMBAS as a replacement.
p0w3n3d 2y ago
Back in 1999 for me most important was to have a great gui design, and VB was cool for this. Then later I would focus on native binary, performance and size of the build hence I switched to Delphi and then to C++. But tbh nowadays I can see that this is this famous triangle: either good and fast but expensive, either fast and cheap but not good, or good and cheap but not fast. So instead of writing in C++ i coded in 2 days a tray helper in pyside. I have no longer size complexes, as other apps tend to be written in electron nowadays, which is super size XXL The point is: prejudice is bad. Use whatever floats your boat
- nasretdinov 2y ago
  Please use float64 for your boat though
kgeist 2y ago
>Yep, it’s written in VB6. Who cares? I'd say security is a problem if one uses a 30 year old piece of software but apparently Microsoft still releases security updates: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=50722 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=507... >A security issue has been identified that could compromise your Windows-based system running Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Service Pack 6 >The Visual Basic 6.0 IDE is no longer supported as of April 8, 2008, however, the Visual Basic team is committed to “It Just Works” compatibility for Visual Basic 6.0 applications >Date Published: >3/23/2021
- KindOne 2y ago
  It was released back in 2016 (or possibly before that?) https://web.archive.org/web/20160430055347/https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=50722 https://web.archive.org/web/20160430055347/https://www.micro... The installer was originally digitally signed with a sha1 certificate. The sha1 certificate with replaced with sha256 on 3/23/2021.
wiseowise 2y ago
I always love a story of impressive software written in “underdog” languages and not hype Go, Rust, Zig etc.
- chii 2y ago
  these rare stories are rare, because the creators of these software aren't bragging about which platform they're using, and merely focus on the software!
qwertox 2y ago
> No multi-threading. A pity. But for a file manager not that important. It's honestly blazingly fast in comparison to Windows Explorer on Windows 11.
- brokencode 2y ago
  As much as I like C# the language, I honestly think that it and .NET are fundamentally flawed when it comes to performance. Native Windows apps just never seem load that fast or work that great. It’s kind of crazy how much better the basic OS apps feel in macOS compared to Windows. I wish Microsoft would have gone in a direction more similar to Apple, with an AOT compilation and reference counting. JIT and garbage collection sound great in theory, but in practice I’ve found them both to be loaded with footguns that more than eliminate any benefits. At least with .NET, that is.
  - neonsunset 2y ago
    Most Windows apps that are guilty of being slow and poorly made do not use the .NET you speak of at all. If they did they would work much better!
    - brokencode 2y ago
      Do you have some examples of large and complex C# applications with really good performance? I’m hard pressed to think of any Microsoft software at all that I think feels really nice. Except for VSCode, which is of course built on Electron and not .NET. The only thing that comes to mind is Paint.NET, which doesn’t seem like all that big of an application. It’s very nicely done, but I think it’s only got like a single dev working on it, so couldn’t be that big.
      - dagaci 2y ago
        Devtoys is great and open-source and .NET and cross-platform * https://devtoys.app/ https://devtoys.app/ and in context to the thread files-community/files is great and open-source and .NET * https://files.community/ https://files.community/ (its actually 96% .net and 3.1% c++)
skirge 2y ago
I know that one of the best bug bounty hunter scripted his work using VB (unlike rest of the world who uses Python/Golang or Rust), if it works and you know it why not? Actually looking for perfect tools is procrastination.
- wiseowise 2y ago
  Does he maintain a blog somewhere to read how he does it?
  - skirge 2y ago
    There's interview but no (too much) technical details: https://securitytrails.com/blog/interview-todayisnew https://securitytrails.com/blog/interview-todayisnew
gdgghhhhh 2y ago
The program doesn't look like a typical VB6 application, I guess the author draws all UI elements himself?
gdgghhhhh 2y ago
I wonder how the code looks, it must be a maze of "on error goto" lines to not crash at the slightest error.
- Deeg9rie9usi 2y ago
  The person that has down voted this doesn't seem to know that error handling in VB6 works like that. Most functions don't return an error code you can check, neither are exceptions available.
aquir 2y ago
It is a great software, now I know why there is no MacOS builds :)
darekkay 2y ago
I've been using XYplorer for 10 years now and it's fantastic. There are just so many features and quality of life improvements over the Windows explorer. It's written by a single person, and they're very responsive. I've recently reported a bug with the search (the first that I've noticed in all those years), and it's been fixed within a day. I'm only worried about the bus factor a little. I have a GitHub repo with some of my settings/scripts/notes for XYplorer if someone's interested: https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/tree/master/xyplorer https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/tree/master/xyplore...
ltbarcly3 2y ago
Sorry VB apologists, it's a weird language with lots of legacy weirdness. If you chuckle at silly things in JS, you'll cry when you learn VB.
nolok 2y ago
For no specific reason other than life random offers I've gone through a few of those "dead and bad" reputational language in my career (VB6, Delphi, PHP), mostly as a case of "there is a lot of money being a decent programmer who can use these correctly". And there are three things I learned about it 1. There is a lot more money in it than you would think. The good part of "there is a lot of newbie using it" is that there is a lot of newbie using it and tons of software in it out there, and once you prove you know what you're doing you drown in high paid work, and with a bit of job selection it's not the bad horrible maintenance kind but decent fun too. 2. There is no need trying to argue with people about it online or whatever. You're not going to convince anyone they're better language than they think. PHP 8 is a top notch language and people are still dumping on it using php 4 things. 3. Ultimately there are people who spend their time talking about what language is right and people who get things done, build something great and it doesn't matter if it's cpp or Javascript or whatever. So at the end of day I've made a fair bit of money improving or building stuff used by lots of people to generate tons of revenue, and everyone involved is happy about it.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  > PHP 8 is a top notch language Maybe the things they've added lately have been well designed, but did they ever actually fix the WTFs from PHP 4? JavaScript has the same problem. They added `let` and `const` but never removed `var` or `==`. If you take a look at ESLint rules there are dozens of footguns that could have been fixed in the language. Not as bad as PHP's footguns, but still...
  - stefanfisk 2y ago
    I spend all of my working hours with modern PHP. IMHO, although its improved A LOT it’s still a mess. But with the right tooling you can kinda-sorta make it behave like a sane language if you squint a bit.
    - dalemhurley 2y ago
      Every single language is a mess. Just look at time and floating point numbers in Java (not having a go at Java).
jonatron 2y ago
I know someone that still has a VB6 job. It's apparently repetitive and they haven't had a new client for many years, but I guess it'll continue until their clients don't need the software.
peteforde 2y ago
In the late 90s, I was a member of Microsoft's MVP program for VB6 and later IIS/ASP. Having used every version of VB (including DOS) I was one of the many who was furious when they petulantly refused to commit to updating VB6 on a parallel track. At one point there was a significant number of us with a petition, and they basically told us to pound sand... So, I did. This was literally the push I needed to switch to open source tooling, and it put me in the right time and place to be a Rails early adopter. I downloaded XYplorer mostly out of curiousity, and it's actually so fast that I am slightly shocked to say that I might be switching to it.
zvrba 2y ago
Recently I wished for "VB for Web". Something that'd make it easy for a tech-competent, but a non-programmer, person to prototype a functional web application.
dalemhurley 2y ago
Your article hits the nail on the head. I loved programming for VB6, VBA and VBScript. PHP has the same issue, it is awesome and powerful but gets a bad rep because the versions before 2004 had issues and the low barriers to get started means beginners love PHP.
pjmlp 2y ago
While VB.NET 1.0 had indeed lots of compatibility issues with VB 6, most of them were fixed in later versions, so I wonder why not at least VB on .NET Framework (Core brings quite a few compatibility issues) I do know VB since VB 3.0 days, did quite a couple of VB 6 to VB.NET, and VB.NET to C# portings, so it isn't like I don't know the subject.
pantulis 2y ago
I think it was Joel Spolsky who said that the sweet spot with VB was throwing seasoned C++ programmers at it, and that became a huge productivity boost to the teams. I think this goes to say that the bad name of VB6 is due to its lower entry barrier, which made it easy for beginner devs to deliver terrible software.
ximeng 2y ago
https://photodemon.org/ https://photodemon.org/ is a photo editing tool written in VB6
- VB6-Programming 2y ago
  PhotoDemon has now been updated to 64 bit using the twinBASIC programming language. twinBASIC is backwards compatible with VB6 (and VBA) and can import VB6 source code and forms.
summarity 2y ago
Can't mention VB6 without one of the biggest archives of source-available software for it: https://github.com/Planet-Source-Code https://github.com/Planet-Source-Code On the topic of "wait what that's VB6", here's an entire 3D modeling and rendering suite in pure VB6: https://github.com/Planet-Source-Code/kaci-lounes-a-3d-digital-reality-engine-v1-00__1-72016 https://github.com/Planet-Source-Code/kaci-lounes-a-3d-digit...
rbanffy 2y ago
VB was the he first viable way to easily tap the “business programmer” who was writing code in Clipper for building competent-looking GUI applications. Along with Windows for Workgroups, it was a game changer for Windows in small businesses who could now afford bespoke Windows applications. Other options all had their quirks that made their apps look out of place on Windows. It was easy to say an app was built with Delphi or FoxPro. VB apps just looked like Microsoft apps and felt perfectly at home. I remember how easy it was to even get the 3D look popularised by Office in VB apps.
movetheworld 2y ago
I love XYPlorer, it's my favorite program and I use it every day.
RaiausderDose 2y ago
Seems cool, I'm using free commander and need 2 vertical panels, because of the ease of coping files. I guess I skipped this app before because on the screenshot it looks like it just has one panel. But after trying it out, it has "dual pane" mode, so I will give this a shoot.
layer8 2y ago
> No multi-threading That isn’t quite correct, because you can take the address of a VB6 procedure and pass it to win32 CreateThread. See the related chapter in Hardcore Visual Basic for example. And of course you can use win32 mutexes and such. Thanks to the win32 interoperability, there aren’t a lot of limits of what you can do in VB6.
bdeshi 2y ago
nice to see this on hn. the dev has just announced[1] start of codebase migration from vb6 to twinbasic which should negate all of the cons described in the article. xyplorer has been providing partial compatibility with 64-bit windows shells by way of some "sidecar" executables, which act like hosts for 64-bit shell extensions, thumbnailers, and whatnot. iirc some of these sidecar tools were originally written in autohotkey; now that's another interesting language. [1]: https://www.xyplorer.com/xyfc/viewtopic.php?t=28273 https://www.xyplorer.com/xyfc/viewtopic.php?t=28273
VB6-Programming 2y ago
The 64 bit version of XYplorer is written in the twinBASIC programming language (actually an import of the VB6 source code and forms).
- neverartful 2y ago
  This is the first I've heard of twinBASIC. I'm happy to see it on the dev tools scene.
  - gramie 2y ago
    A dev tool with a monthly subscription? That's enough to stop me right there. An alternative is B4J, a free (as in beer) BASIC that compiles to Java, so should run just about anywhere. It also has * B4A - a free version for Android * B4R - a free version for Arduino and ESP8266 * B4I - a paid version for iOS The main (sole?) developer is ridiculously responsive and helpful.
    - wilg 2y ago
      it seems pretty reasonable to charge $30-50 a month for somebody doing the hero's work of reimplementing and building on top of a 30 year old programming environment. also there's a free one! spray money the people who do crazy niche work! that's what makes the world beautiful!
    - forgotpwd16 2y ago
      >A dev tool with a monthly subscription? It seems that can buy a perpetual license for GBP £5000 / developer, which is equal to 16 years of monthly subscription (quite optimistic for a 3yo project).
      - gilbertbw 2y ago
        They actually have a new year deal [0] on a perpetual licence to all v1 versions for £249, equal to 10 months of the subscription. [0] https://twinbasic.com/NEWYEAR25 https://twinbasic.com/NEWYEAR25

240 points by ethanpil 2y ago

It does the job, so "Who Cares?"

I recently discovered Remobjects and their development tools. Amongst other things, they create Mercury, with they describe as a modern Visual Basic that can compile for: - .Net - JVM - Android (JDK and NDK) - iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS - Windows - Linux - WebAssembly https://www.remobjects.com/elements/mercury/ https://www.remobjects.com/elements/mercury/

pryelluw 2y ago
Feels weird to pay for this. I’m definitely spoiled by open source tooling.
- benatkin 2y ago
  With Moonbit and Wolfram Language, it feels like a renaissance of paid programming languages.
  - forgotpwd16 2y ago
    Wolfram ie Mathematica language predates VB1. Being commercial was the norm back then, and due to its academia widespread use has remained as such.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- tonyedgecombe 2y ago
  I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand it's great that people can write software without any financial friction, on the other I think developers should be rewarded for their work and I have little doubt the remote objects tools wouldn't exist without some kind of commercial reward.
neverartful 2y ago
Yes, Remobjects makes some nice tools. I absolutely adore their Oxygene language.
dr_kiszonka 2y ago
Is there any documentation or tutorial on how to create a cross platform mobile app using any of their languages? The value proposition is great, but I can't find any actual code.
- neverartful 2y ago
  Have a look at their github repos. They have a fair bit of sample code sprinkled about.

benatkin 2y ago

They should have written Dogecoin in VB, then it would have been even sillier.

KetoManx64 2y ago

I used XYPlorer for about 5-6 years until I made the switch to using Linux on all my machines last year. The scripting, speed, dual panes, customization, portability between machines (i used Syncthing to sync my configs between 3 machines) on XyPlorer are phenomenal and I've sadly not been able to find a Linux native file manager that's at the same level. Dolphin comes close but even with qdbus commands it sadly not as customizable as XYPlorer. I think it's the one thing I miss the most about Windows.

captn3m0 2y ago
My one thing was “Everything by Voidtools”. It piggy backed on the NTFS index, something no tool does for Linux-native filesystems. Does XYPlorer work with Wine?
- pacifika 2y ago
  http://cboxdoerfer.github.io/fsearch/ http://cboxdoerfer.github.io/fsearch/ FSearch is a Linux alternative.
- forgotpwd16 2y ago
  >Linux-native filesystems Because they lack something (for worse or better depending on one's requirements) equivalent to NTFS' MFT & USN Journal. Closest is building own file db by first-time full scan and then updating via fanotify/inotify. This is what FSearch tool does.
  - vdm 2y ago
    http://cboxdoerfer.github.io/fsearch/ http://cboxdoerfer.github.io/fsearch/
jlahijani 2y ago
I've used XYplorer daily since 2008. It's a fantastic piece of software and updated all the time. Wish there were something comparable in Linux.

RajT88 2y ago

Early in my career, I worked in support for a company which made developer tooling. Male programmers would call in and do a bit of intro so you knew they were not dumb, just busy. VB6 programmers would say things like "I am a very senior VB developer". They were the only "very senior" programmers who did not seem to understand things about OS stuff. Like exported functions and their different calling conventions, why you need to "register" COM .dlls, environment blocks, handles, etc.

j16sdiz 2y ago
> They were the only "very senior" programmers... Don't forget nodejs.
- noduerme 2y ago
  Really? I feel like those of us maintaining PHP stacks are much more "senior" by now...
treve 2y ago
I feel this narrative about less experienced developers probably made sense to you back then, but it might be time to update it!
- RajT88 2y ago
  This narrative was about how VB did not produce senior developers that understood how computers worked. Never observed such a thing with any other language. (Of course I am too young to have met people building business apps off COBOL or BASIC).
  - treve 2y ago
    There's still lots of gatekeeping everywhere if you know where to look!
flomo 2y ago
Point taken that VB was a programming ghetto. But the actual seniors were fighting the language to call Win32, writing MTS servers, and etc, they 'got' all that stuff. I did some VBS ASP back in the day (not VB), and the language was more just annoying, at least partially due to the BASIC legacy stuff. Like it didn't even have a hashmap, you had to import something from Internet Explorer.

pyeri 2y ago

Both VB6 and FreePascal/Delphi are highly capable tools even in today's context, they just need more marketing.

ianhawes 2y ago
> VB6 highly capable > VB6 only available in 32-bit
- trinix912 2y ago
  I really don't see how this invalidates the statement, regarding that VB's primary domain is rapid CRUD application development. Those applications usually don't use >2GBs of RAM, at least from what I've seen working on several old ones written in VB6, Delphi, PowerBuilder... Is a 64-bit Electron CRUD app that much more capable/better in getting the job done than a 32-bit VB6 equivalent? Both are merely an SQL client in the end.
_blk 2y ago
Yeah, I used VB5 as one of my first languages and today did half a day of VBA. Definitely enough to quickly make me want to raise my hourly rate. Esp. in that office macro editor. Btw and totally unrelated office can now interpret VBA, (office)TypeScript and Python. Did I miss any?
mardifoufs 2y ago
Delphi, maybe, sure. But starting a new project with vb6 is just weird unless it's the only language someone is familiar with. It's a dead end, even on the only platform where it makes sense to use it.
unscaled 2y ago
FreePascal/Delphi and VB6 are entirely different beasts. For one, FreePascal and Delphi are still under development. Delphi had the following language features added since 1998 (this is just a small selection): Extension methods/properties ("class helpers"), generics, enum types, for..in loops, static methods, closures, smart pointers, value types ("records"[1]), attributes, variables can be declared anywhere (removing Pascal's limitation), type inference, multiline strings. Besides all of this, modern Delphi can compile code for Windows, Linux and Mac, as well as Android and iOS. It seems like there's even a cross-platform library for writing apps that can run on both Mobile and Desktop called FireMonkey. VB6, on the other hand, is a language frozen in time. It never supported any other platform than 32-bit Windows[2]. It only really works on the new Microsoft Surface Laptops thanks to emulation, but I can also run Nintendo 8-bit games on a Surface Pro 11 using an emulator — that doesn't say much. Unicode support is also a mess. VB6 always used Unicode internally, but this was implementing during the UCS-2 heyday (so you need hacks to use Emoji for instance). Worse yet, is that VB6 was never really designed to run natively on Windows NT, so it's mostly using using the XxxYyyA family of APIs instead of the XxxYyyW family of APIs. This means that you can only display text in a non-English writing if your system's ANSI codpeage is set to that language (in the past you had to restart Windows to change this, not sure if it has improved). To make things worse, some languages (from countries that were too pair to get ANSI pages in Microsoft during the 1990s). So no Ethiopian languages or Mongolian as the author claims. Windows ANSI codpeages also do not "fully support" Japanese and Chinese as the author claims. Over the years the governments of Japan, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong have updated their national standards (which defined tables of characters that should be digitally encodable) and introduced more characters that were previously not mapped. These characters were not new or fake[3] — they were just less common, but still in use. All of these various government standards (like JIS X 0213, GB 18030, Big5-2003) got quickly incorporated into newer versions of Unicode, but the Windows ANSI codepages stagnated and they don't support some of the characters in these codepages. I'm not sure how it's going to affect VB6, but I'm pretty sure that some Unicode CJK characters would just not map into ANSI and would not be displayed even if your system code page is set correctly. With all of these things considered, no developer who cares about their users should choose VB6 for writing a modern app. I'd also argue that no developer who cares about themselves would do that. VB6 wasn't a great language to begin with. It was better than VB3, but it was still inferior to Delphi even when it was out. Customizing the UI beyond the basics, often needed custom ActiveX components written in C++ or messing around with a lot of raw Windows API calls. Error handling was very painful too. It was never a great developer experience even back of the day if you wanted to do anything beyond the basics. --- [1] To be fair, Borland's Pascal dialects had value types support since they've implemented object oriented programming (that came in either Turbo Pascal 5.5 or 6.0, I don't exactly remember). Turbo Pascal "objects" could be put on the stack or as pointers like in C++. They even had destructors that would be invoked automatically when the object went out-of-scope, again like C++'s RAII. But the old "objects" kinda botched polymorphism (I don't even remember the details), so when Delphi came out they've been replaced with "classes" that are Reference-only (like Java, but initially without any form of automatic memory management). [2] VBA was originally ported to Mac, but it is not exactly the same language, lacks the GUI designer and can't run most VB6 apps [3] In most cases, at least: https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html

tombert 2y ago

I debated writing an app in ColdFusion (well OpenBluedragon or Railo or something) about a year ago, partly out of curiosity to how well it holds up, but mostly out of sentimentality for the language. I had a bit of trouble getting started, and eventually the project morphed less into web and more into data-processing so I ended up using Java, but I still occasionally get the urge to write using a “dead” language.

silisili 2y ago

VB3 was my first real intro to programming. Well, I started with C++ but abandoned it as an impatient child as describing a window in code wasn't fun. I wish we had a new drag and drop WYSIWYG to get people interested. Put Python or Go or even Basic behind it. QT maybe? Heck make it Electron. I'm not sure I would be where I am today without VB having existed, and it's a shame kids today don't have the same tools available.

xtracto 2y ago
Have a look at Gambas3 [1] it kind of continued where Vb6 stopped. It's super useful for quick GUI based software. [1] https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html# https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html#
- graemep 2y ago
  Gambas is Linux (and presumably Unix) only, right? A VB6 substitute that does not run on Windows seems very niche.
profsummergig 2y ago
Even a tool like Frontpage was a game changer. Simple website in a minute without any need to know HTML. No free tool that does that today. Dreamweaver does, but it's paid.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- cfn 2y ago
  That's how I learned HTML, building the page in Frontpage and then looking at the markup. I don't remember it being free though.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    It was very easy to get from the usual “alternative” software sources.

giancarlostoro 2y ago

Microsoft has open sourced so much, I wish they would work on an effort to fully open source VB6 at least the bits they fully own and control. I have a feeling the community might rally to fill in the gaps, even if its over a few years. I mean, look at EverQuest Online, insanely old MMO client, still has people building private servers, and even clients.

actuallyalys 2y ago

I don't think being written in VB6 is actually a good reason not to use XYPlorer, which seems like a capable tool, but this page doesn't seem really reassuring? What would reassure me is knowing that there is a maintained version of VB6 for modern systems. Luckily, there apparently is such an implementation, twinBasic, and they are already using it for 64-bit releases.

draw_down 2y ago

[dead]

ryukoposting 2y ago

I think VB is totally fine. It's a pragmatic solution to a real problem, and the ugliest things about it today are all a product of hindsight. On the other hand, this rubs me the wrong way: > So, wouldn’t it be logical to conclude: If such an application can be written in VB6 then VB6 cannot be that bad after all? Yes, it absolutely could be bad. Our industry consists, in no small part, of turd polishing. Plenty of good software is written in bad (or ill-fitted) languages, and vice versa.

jeswin 2y ago
> Plenty of good software is written in bad (or ill-fitted) languages, and vice versa. That's because you mention VB6 as a language. VB6 is not about the language, but about the platform and vertical integration; from the IDE to the app to the distribution. It was magical that dropping a telephony component into a form enabled the form to make phone calls. Or you could drag-drop a Web Browser component, and have a browser inside your app. Or a database component, and a thousand other things. Few of these required reading the docs. There are many apps that can be written (and deployed!) faster in legacy VB than with anything available today.
- chii 2y ago
  > It was magical that dropping a telephony component into a form enabled the form to make phone calls the magic of COM[0]! But when it crashed it crashed hard. And the underlying programming model (beyond just using premade ones) are a bit hard to grok and fraught with footguns that shoot not only yourself, but the OS as well. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model
  - unscaled 2y ago
    And COM/OLE/ActiveX components (whatever Microsoft fancied calling them that year) could have been used just as easily from Delphi. And you don't even need COM. You could do the same things today with RAD components in, say, Java. But it's just no longer a fad. Programmers nowadays don't think that dragging a component that makes phone calls and linking it to a button. Nowadays, they would just write "npm install telephony" and then add a couple of lines that they got from the README.md on GitHub (or from their AI assistant) to make a call: import { Dialer } from "telephony"; const dialer = new Dialer(); dialer.call("+1 800 1234 1234");

rkagerer 2y ago

Works on Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11 That's better than you can say for a lot of software these days

nolok 2y ago
It's a feature of limiting yourself to the win32 api (and functions of it available since 2001 only). Eg the moment you need to deal with security like certificate or whatever this goes out the window.
- layer8 2y ago
  You can always program it to be conditional on the runtime environment.
- rkagerer 2y ago
  In some ways I wish they just kept building on that API instead of introducing lots of competing (or complimentary, depending on your viewpoint) frameworks and philosophies.
- fafalone 2y ago
  Plenty VB6 apps use tons of APIs introduced well beyond 2001. I'm not too familiar with XYPlorer but it looks like it will support some more recent stuff if available. One of my hobbies was writing demo projects showing the use of new APIs and COM objects. I have a shell browsing control with all of the features of Explorer; it for example can browse attached media devices like cameras and phones that don't even have normal file system paths and can't be used in older apps, because it's based entirely around shell interfaces and APIs not available until Vista. Another recent project was how to use the Win7+ Ribbon UI controls. I don't support earlier Windows versions than 7 at all in my personal projects now. Security or certificates? No problem. I've written VB6 compatible versions of the entire BCrypt and NCrypt APIs covering everything up through the latest SDK, and people have written practical programs using those plus tons of other Windows security, crypto, and cert subsystems. There's connection classes using the newest TLS versions. OAuth? Sure. People are replacing older in-app browsers with WebView2-based ones. If that's still insufficient, and you really want something more modern, it's entirely possible and there's plenty of demos of using WinRT from VB6 and twinBASIC. XAML controls? Yup, people are doing it. We just had a big debate about the merits of using the latest Windows 11 RichEdit controls supporting color fonts directly vs using the XAML implementation instead, or implementing a windowless RichEdit with the modern Direct2D rendering pathway like the XAML one does underneath. Speaking of DirectX, there's also VB/tB compatible libraries for Direct3D 11 and 12 and the Media Foundation subsystem. Just because a language is 'frozen' in 1998 doesn't mean it can't call modern APIs and use modern libraries. And now with twinBASIC it's unfrozen, adding tons of new language features and modernizations. Do you also think modern apps absolutely need the very latest C++ standards and you can't make modern apps in C++ 03? Hell, I've even written demos of how to use tB to make kernel mode drivers that run on Win10/11, inspired by someone figuring out how to make one in VB6 that runs on Windows up through the last 32bit version. Since tB supports 64bit, they run on 64bit 10/11 now.

29athrowaway 2y ago

You can use GAMBAS as a replacement.

p0w3n3d 2y ago

Back in 1999 for me most important was to have a great gui design, and VB was cool for this. Then later I would focus on native binary, performance and size of the build hence I switched to Delphi and then to C++. But tbh nowadays I can see that this is this famous triangle: either good and fast but expensive, either fast and cheap but not good, or good and cheap but not fast. So instead of writing in C++ i coded in 2 days a tray helper in pyside. I have no longer size complexes, as other apps tend to be written in electron nowadays, which is super size XXL The point is: prejudice is bad. Use whatever floats your boat

nasretdinov 2y ago
Please use float64 for your boat though

kgeist 2y ago

>Yep, it’s written in VB6. Who cares? I'd say security is a problem if one uses a 30 year old piece of software but apparently Microsoft still releases security updates: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=50722 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=507... >A security issue has been identified that could compromise your Windows-based system running Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Service Pack 6 >The Visual Basic 6.0 IDE is no longer supported as of April 8, 2008, however, the Visual Basic team is committed to “It Just Works” compatibility for Visual Basic 6.0 applications >Date Published: >3/23/2021

KindOne 2y ago
It was released back in 2016 (or possibly before that?) https://web.archive.org/web/20160430055347/https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=50722 https://web.archive.org/web/20160430055347/https://www.micro... The installer was originally digitally signed with a sha1 certificate. The sha1 certificate with replaced with sha256 on 3/23/2021.

wiseowise 2y ago

I always love a story of impressive software written in “underdog” languages and not hype Go, Rust, Zig etc.

chii 2y ago
these rare stories are rare, because the creators of these software aren't bragging about which platform they're using, and merely focus on the software!

qwertox 2y ago

> No multi-threading. A pity. But for a file manager not that important. It's honestly blazingly fast in comparison to Windows Explorer on Windows 11.

brokencode 2y ago
As much as I like C# the language, I honestly think that it and .NET are fundamentally flawed when it comes to performance. Native Windows apps just never seem load that fast or work that great. It’s kind of crazy how much better the basic OS apps feel in macOS compared to Windows. I wish Microsoft would have gone in a direction more similar to Apple, with an AOT compilation and reference counting. JIT and garbage collection sound great in theory, but in practice I’ve found them both to be loaded with footguns that more than eliminate any benefits. At least with .NET, that is.
- neonsunset 2y ago
  Most Windows apps that are guilty of being slow and poorly made do not use the .NET you speak of at all. If they did they would work much better!
  - brokencode 2y ago
    Do you have some examples of large and complex C# applications with really good performance? I’m hard pressed to think of any Microsoft software at all that I think feels really nice. Except for VSCode, which is of course built on Electron and not .NET. The only thing that comes to mind is Paint.NET, which doesn’t seem like all that big of an application. It’s very nicely done, but I think it’s only got like a single dev working on it, so couldn’t be that big.
    - dagaci 2y ago
      Devtoys is great and open-source and .NET and cross-platform * https://devtoys.app/ https://devtoys.app/ and in context to the thread files-community/files is great and open-source and .NET * https://files.community/ https://files.community/ (its actually 96% .net and 3.1% c++)

skirge 2y ago

I know that one of the best bug bounty hunter scripted his work using VB (unlike rest of the world who uses Python/Golang or Rust), if it works and you know it why not? Actually looking for perfect tools is procrastination.

wiseowise 2y ago
Does he maintain a blog somewhere to read how he does it?
- skirge 2y ago
  There's interview but no (too much) technical details: https://securitytrails.com/blog/interview-todayisnew https://securitytrails.com/blog/interview-todayisnew

gdgghhhhh 2y ago

The program doesn't look like a typical VB6 application, I guess the author draws all UI elements himself?

gdgghhhhh 2y ago

I wonder how the code looks, it must be a maze of "on error goto" lines to not crash at the slightest error.

Deeg9rie9usi 2y ago
The person that has down voted this doesn't seem to know that error handling in VB6 works like that. Most functions don't return an error code you can check, neither are exceptions available.

aquir 2y ago

It is a great software, now I know why there is no MacOS builds :)

darekkay 2y ago

I've been using XYplorer for 10 years now and it's fantastic. There are just so many features and quality of life improvements over the Windows explorer. It's written by a single person, and they're very responsive. I've recently reported a bug with the search (the first that I've noticed in all those years), and it's been fixed within a day. I'm only worried about the bus factor a little. I have a GitHub repo with some of my settings/scripts/notes for XYplorer if someone's interested: https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/tree/master/xyplorer https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/tree/master/xyplore...

ltbarcly3 2y ago

Sorry VB apologists, it's a weird language with lots of legacy weirdness. If you chuckle at silly things in JS, you'll cry when you learn VB.

nolok 2y ago

For no specific reason other than life random offers I've gone through a few of those "dead and bad" reputational language in my career (VB6, Delphi, PHP), mostly as a case of "there is a lot of money being a decent programmer who can use these correctly". And there are three things I learned about it 1. There is a lot more money in it than you would think. The good part of "there is a lot of newbie using it" is that there is a lot of newbie using it and tons of software in it out there, and once you prove you know what you're doing you drown in high paid work, and with a bit of job selection it's not the bad horrible maintenance kind but decent fun too. 2. There is no need trying to argue with people about it online or whatever. You're not going to convince anyone they're better language than they think. PHP 8 is a top notch language and people are still dumping on it using php 4 things. 3. Ultimately there are people who spend their time talking about what language is right and people who get things done, build something great and it doesn't matter if it's cpp or Javascript or whatever. So at the end of day I've made a fair bit of money improving or building stuff used by lots of people to generate tons of revenue, and everyone involved is happy about it.

IshKebab 2y ago
> PHP 8 is a top notch language Maybe the things they've added lately have been well designed, but did they ever actually fix the WTFs from PHP 4? JavaScript has the same problem. They added `let` and `const` but never removed `var` or `==`. If you take a look at ESLint rules there are dozens of footguns that could have been fixed in the language. Not as bad as PHP's footguns, but still...
- stefanfisk 2y ago
  I spend all of my working hours with modern PHP. IMHO, although its improved A LOT it’s still a mess. But with the right tooling you can kinda-sorta make it behave like a sane language if you squint a bit.
  - dalemhurley 2y ago
    Every single language is a mess. Just look at time and floating point numbers in Java (not having a go at Java).

jonatron 2y ago

I know someone that still has a VB6 job. It's apparently repetitive and they haven't had a new client for many years, but I guess it'll continue until their clients don't need the software.

peteforde 2y ago

In the late 90s, I was a member of Microsoft's MVP program for VB6 and later IIS/ASP. Having used every version of VB (including DOS) I was one of the many who was furious when they petulantly refused to commit to updating VB6 on a parallel track. At one point there was a significant number of us with a petition, and they basically told us to pound sand... So, I did. This was literally the push I needed to switch to open source tooling, and it put me in the right time and place to be a Rails early adopter. I downloaded XYplorer mostly out of curiousity, and it's actually so fast that I am slightly shocked to say that I might be switching to it.

zvrba 2y ago

Recently I wished for "VB for Web". Something that'd make it easy for a tech-competent, but a non-programmer, person to prototype a functional web application.

dalemhurley 2y ago

Your article hits the nail on the head. I loved programming for VB6, VBA and VBScript. PHP has the same issue, it is awesome and powerful but gets a bad rep because the versions before 2004 had issues and the low barriers to get started means beginners love PHP.

pjmlp 2y ago

While VB.NET 1.0 had indeed lots of compatibility issues with VB 6, most of them were fixed in later versions, so I wonder why not at least VB on .NET Framework (Core brings quite a few compatibility issues) I do know VB since VB 3.0 days, did quite a couple of VB 6 to VB.NET, and VB.NET to C# portings, so it isn't like I don't know the subject.

pantulis 2y ago

I think it was Joel Spolsky who said that the sweet spot with VB was throwing seasoned C++ programmers at it, and that became a huge productivity boost to the teams. I think this goes to say that the bad name of VB6 is due to its lower entry barrier, which made it easy for beginner devs to deliver terrible software.

ximeng 2y ago

https://photodemon.org/ https://photodemon.org/ is a photo editing tool written in VB6

VB6-Programming 2y ago
PhotoDemon has now been updated to 64 bit using the twinBASIC programming language. twinBASIC is backwards compatible with VB6 (and VBA) and can import VB6 source code and forms.

summarity 2y ago

Can't mention VB6 without one of the biggest archives of source-available software for it: https://github.com/Planet-Source-Code https://github.com/Planet-Source-Code On the topic of "wait what that's VB6", here's an entire 3D modeling and rendering suite in pure VB6: https://github.com/Planet-Source-Code/kaci-lounes-a-3d-digital-reality-engine-v1-00__1-72016 https://github.com/Planet-Source-Code/kaci-lounes-a-3d-digit...

rbanffy 2y ago

VB was the he first viable way to easily tap the “business programmer” who was writing code in Clipper for building competent-looking GUI applications. Along with Windows for Workgroups, it was a game changer for Windows in small businesses who could now afford bespoke Windows applications. Other options all had their quirks that made their apps look out of place on Windows. It was easy to say an app was built with Delphi or FoxPro. VB apps just looked like Microsoft apps and felt perfectly at home. I remember how easy it was to even get the 3D look popularised by Office in VB apps.

movetheworld 2y ago

I love XYPlorer, it's my favorite program and I use it every day.

RaiausderDose 2y ago

Seems cool, I'm using free commander and need 2 vertical panels, because of the ease of coping files. I guess I skipped this app before because on the screenshot it looks like it just has one panel. But after trying it out, it has "dual pane" mode, so I will give this a shoot.

layer8 2y ago

> No multi-threading That isn’t quite correct, because you can take the address of a VB6 procedure and pass it to win32 CreateThread. See the related chapter in Hardcore Visual Basic for example. And of course you can use win32 mutexes and such. Thanks to the win32 interoperability, there aren’t a lot of limits of what you can do in VB6.

bdeshi 2y ago

nice to see this on hn. the dev has just announced[1] start of codebase migration from vb6 to twinbasic which should negate all of the cons described in the article. xyplorer has been providing partial compatibility with 64-bit windows shells by way of some "sidecar" executables, which act like hosts for 64-bit shell extensions, thumbnailers, and whatnot. iirc some of these sidecar tools were originally written in autohotkey; now that's another interesting language. [1]: https://www.xyplorer.com/xyfc/viewtopic.php?t=28273 https://www.xyplorer.com/xyfc/viewtopic.php?t=28273

VB6-Programming 2y ago

The 64 bit version of XYplorer is written in the twinBASIC programming language (actually an import of the VB6 source code and forms).

neverartful 2y ago
This is the first I've heard of twinBASIC. I'm happy to see it on the dev tools scene.
- gramie 2y ago
  A dev tool with a monthly subscription? That's enough to stop me right there. An alternative is B4J, a free (as in beer) BASIC that compiles to Java, so should run just about anywhere. It also has * B4A - a free version for Android * B4R - a free version for Arduino and ESP8266 * B4I - a paid version for iOS The main (sole?) developer is ridiculously responsive and helpful.
  - wilg 2y ago
    it seems pretty reasonable to charge $30-50 a month for somebody doing the hero's work of reimplementing and building on top of a 30 year old programming environment. also there's a free one! spray money the people who do crazy niche work! that's what makes the world beautiful!
  - forgotpwd16 2y ago
    >A dev tool with a monthly subscription? It seems that can buy a perpetual license for GBP £5000 / developer, which is equal to 16 years of monthly subscription (quite optimistic for a 3yo project).
    - gilbertbw 2y ago
      They actually have a new year deal [0] on a perpetual licence to all v1 versions for £249, equal to 10 months of the subscription. [0] https://twinbasic.com/NEWYEAR25 https://twinbasic.com/NEWYEAR25