This is the milestone we waited to validate the C back-end. It tooks quite a lot of iteration with the alpha testers (and thanks to all of you all btw) to iron major issues, but here we are: the IDE is mostly working when compiled with the C back-end. This is a big deal: the IDE is a very large software of about 130 000 lines of PureBasic code and using a lot of different features of the language. So what’s the functional changes ? Well, nothing. And that’s on purpose. The plan is to be able to switch seemlessly from ASM to C back-end and be able to compile the IDE on new platform, like Raspberry or OS X M1.

The only noticeable change is the compilation time, which jumps from 5 secs on the ASM back-end to a whooping 24 secs on the C back-end (based on GCC) with the debugger on and optimisation disabled. Keep in mind I got a very old CPU (Core i7 860 from 2009) and as discussed previously, just swapping the C compiler could lead to dramatic improvements.

All in all, it’s very good news, and we are looking forward to fix the last remaining showstoppers and creating a beta version for all the OS, including may be some new like Raspberry !