Turning ten !

If you take a quick look to the history page on www.purebasic.com, you will see this:

PureBasic 1.60 (AmigaOS) (09/09/2000)

9 september 2000. Seriously. So PureBasic is officially haunting the web since 10 years, which is kind of amazing, for different reasons. Let’s try to step back, catch a time machine, and see what and how it happened.

I got the chance to have a computer very young, at twelve. It was an amstrad CPC 6128, with a very low resolution but colored screen and strange disk format. My main attract was games, games and games. I spent countless hours playing many games (Barbarian anyone ?!). On a side note, in the book sold with the computer, there were some listings to type yourself a game using the build-in BASIC (an old school one, without procedure or even label, so you have to specify the line number to jump at when using GOTO or GOSUB). Out of curiousity, i tried to make it work. It was a ‘dart’ game, and it took forever to type back the printed listing to the computer. The result was rather disappointing, and the game was pretty bad.

A few years later, a friend got an Amiga 500 and when i looked at the games running on it, it was just unbelievable. The graphics and the sounds were way above anything else, and the games availables were just stunning. After a lot of negotiations, my brother and I get the precious, and a brand new Amiga 500+ hit our desk ! We used it a lot as an advanced gaming console, and had a lot of fun. Then the number of games released on the platform decreased to almost zero very quickly due to Commodore bankruptcy, and then my main point of interest changed.

I started programming somewhen in 1994. At first, it was some small tools programmed in, guess it, Basic. When the PureBasic project started, early in 1998, it was a quick attempt to support new PowerPC processors freshly available on the Amiga in a Basic language, with a syntax based on BlitzBasic which was discontinued. It was very small, with few features and very tied to the AmigaOS. It got about 200 build-in commands, an ‘IDE’ which was mostly only a text editing area and a ‘Compile/Run’ menu and a rudimentary runtime debugger. The whole commands were programmed in 680×0 asssembly code, which was the rules on the Amiga to have optimized code. And as the AmigaOS didn’t have memory protection, better check your code twice before running it, especially when dealing with pointers, or it will immediately reboot ! So far i got some positive comments from the internet community (yes, we had internet in 1998, even if it wasn’t fast) about PureBasic and the choice was made to do a Windows and Linux version as soon as possible. I was studing computer science and learned the C programming language, so it was a good time to recode everything in a ‘portable’ way. I didn’t knew so much about real world programming and i made a lot of mistake when porting it in C, and hopefully learned quite a bit from it.

Late in 2000, we publicly released the first Windows version and it was a real achievement, for me and for the future of PureBasic. The real deal started here, as the Windows audience was way larger than the AmigaOS one. We got a lot of feedback (compared to what i expected) and it was a great source of motivation. André jumped into the boat and since then handle the german part of PureBasic. The plan was to add as much as commands as possible to reach the critical mass which could attract users and let them do a complete software without hassle. The releases iteration was much faster than what it is now, because the shipped code was lower quality and we didn’t do synchronized releases between platforms. The development of the different versions on linux, windows and amigaos was very time consuming, as the build was not unified and nothing was virtualized. On Windows, all the libraries were coded in x86 assembly, which was obviously a wrong choice: much longer/harder to develop, not significant size/speed gain most of the time and more important not portable on x64. Timo joined the team and helped a lot to refactor the libs and the build structure.

Then we added quite a number of features, dealing with a lot of API and we reached in 2006 another important mark in PureBasic history: the 4.00 release.  I think than the project took a professional turn at this point. It took 6 years to reach it but then we had some interesting features:

– Flexible commandset, with more than 900 build in commands
– Support for the 3 major operating system (Windows, Linux, OS X), with an high compatibility level
– Buildin unicode & thread support
– Full featured, modern IDE
– Robust debugger, which comes in 3 flavours (console, standalone GUI and IDE integrated)

Four years later, we are at 4.51, which is a general refinement of 4.00. More commands, more stability, more fun. Internally, we have enhanced many things, making our development easier, faster and more robust. Time flies, but it’s great to see what have been achieved. We have very high expectations for the future, there is so much things left to do !

So far, thank you to all the PureBasic folks which are actually using it and make all this possible. See you in 10 years…

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