Monthly Archives: December 2018

The Future of the Desktop & PureBasic

Another year has gone by, an its another guest post by Syed Ibrahim (@TI-994A) that saves us from going post-less in 2018. Thanks 🙂


Another year has swooshed by, and 2019 will see PureBasic turning 21, and still going strong.

New Technologies & Platforms

As we all know, the current eco-system is choc-full of APIs, SDKs, new languages, and even more RAD tools and frameworks, all struggling to stay ahead of the curve, and remain relevant. An industry once dominated by the desktop has now splintered into an array of platforms, from the web, to the mobile phone, to smart devices and wearables, and soon on IOT everywhere.

The technologies vying to be the development tool of choice are also ever-growing, with Microsoft jumping into the Mac & iPhone arena with their acquisition of Xamarin, Apple and Google introducing BASIC-like languages with Swift & Kotlin to lure more developers onto their platforms, and Google introducing their very own cross-platform mobile SDK called Flutter, for reasons still quite unclear (for Fuchsia, perhaps?).

The Mighty Desktop

Despite all these shake-ups, the desktop platform will continue to be the indispensable backbone of the consumer, business, and educational sectors. They will also be the cornerstone of every new emerging platform, as integral hosts and back-end servers.

Sadly however, this foundational platform has been neglected, seeing almost little to no progress in development tools or technologies. While all the players have been busy in the cross-platform race, they offer only clumsy and bloated solutions for desktop development as part of so-called single code-base suites. Needless to say, the results have been dismal.

While there have been many champions in the desktop development platforms over the decades, many have fallen behind, and even more have simply thrown in the towel. Loyal users have been left frustrated and in the lurch, having to migrate their skills and code bases to other development platforms and languages.

The Stable & Solid Tool of Choice

The one (yes, ONE!) exception to this is PureBasic, which has strongly been forging ahead on all three of the major desktop platforms (Windows, MacOS, and Linux), growing and evolving year after year, staying relevant and on top of all the current technologies, always offering its loyal user-base the best development experience. PureBasic has continuously remained on the cutting-edge for the past twenty years, diligently incorporating new features and functions as they become available on the respective platforms, all the while keeping close to the core, to deliver the most optimized and native results. And all this under a single and fully portable code base!

Today, no other development tool offers the same native feature-set on as many platforms, with the speed, size, and performance that PureBasic does. Its binaries remain highly competitive even with the likes of platform-specific compilers, but with the ease and simplicity of the BASIC language. Even among the most formidable players, stability has been a major issue. Google has been developing and touting multiple languages, from Go, to Kotlin, and now Dart. And Microsoft axed the original Visual Basic DOS/Windows suite hardly a decade from its inception.

The Future of PureBasic

Our collective hats off to TEAM PureBasic as we look forward to the new and exciting magic that they hold for us all. At 21, PureBasic is the oldest actively-developed cross-platform tool on the market today. At this pace, we can be sure of many, many Merry Christmases to come!