CCSwitching Code
Posted by jamba on February 6, 2010
Where I work, I am a software engineer–so I do a lot of coding. In the (almost) 4 years I have been there, we (another se, and me) have used mostly VB6 for just about everything…and we have several programs that we have written in-house that range in function. Mostly data handling/analyzation/stuff.
Anyway, as Win7 and Vista started spreading around and VB6 does not even run the IDE on those OS’s, we started searching for coding alternatives over a year ago.
The primary choices were:
We did not want to use .NET, as it is really heavy and bloated…not to mention if we are doing all the work to convert this code, might as well get some speed and executable size advantage with it. So this option was out pretty quick, or at least hanging back in the reserves.
RealBasic…this one looked interesting. Cross-platform Windows and Linux and Mac. We only use Windows at work, but it is nice to have the option. The IDE is okay etc etc, we just ultimately decided to go elsewhere. Mostly because REAL looked unstable as a company, and their releases seem buggy.
PowerBasic. wow, a great tool. Windows only, but very powerful. Fast executing code, and small .exe’s. I was ready to be done and get started on some conversion. I actually did quite a bit of coding with this one, and a few experiments. After some careful consideration, and one final straw, we finally decided on…
Going with PureBasic! I think this option merges the plus sides of all of the rest of the options. It is cross-platform, both 32 and 64 bit, runs fast, and compiles small. Not to mention the community is very friendly AND helpful.
PureBasic seems like a small project, but it is very community driven. They listen to the ideas from the users, and they frequently add new features. This is truly a very flexible programming language. AND it has the BASIC dialect, which is a plus in my opinion. Some people see Basic as a weakness or something like that–as if everything could/should be written in C… If that were the case I would not want to be a programmer at all. C definitely has it’s place, and I do still use it sometimes, but Basic is what I MUCH prefer to use!
So that is what we have chosen, and so far I am very happy. As time goes along and I create some useful tools (or examples, or …whatever) I will be posting them on my code website: jrob.co.cc.
Hopefully I will also get into doing some Linux development, either for work or recreation. I just have to come up with some idea that I would like to use a program for…but it seems like everything I can think of already exists!
Thoughts on Free and Open Source Software (as it relates to me right now) « factorQ.net said
[...] (classic, 6), with just a touch in C for micro controllers. Only recently have we started the conversion to PureBasic, which allows for us to compile cross-platform. So what I am wondering is this: if I create some [...]