Hello all,
I use PB to create solutions to the enterprise. Mostly those are a service applications running in a server room and processing big amount of data (gigabytes) in the business intelligence, system integration and data analysis field. PB's ultimate power make this possible, execution speed is near C and development time is much more shorter, things are simpler, easy to maintain, better code, clean syntax and finally less bugs compared to other tools/languages. Cross platform support is necessary because both Linux and Windows servers are used by customers.
I like to focus to the solution, not play with the programming tools and make things more complicate than needed. I have used countless programming languages since late 1980's from assembler to high level application builders, somehow PB is often a winner when choosing a language to use in a project. It's amazing that beginners can start programming very quickly with PB and same time it's not limited to beginners, it's a power tool for experienced programmers! Also PB's power mean that energy consumption in the running application is very low if a programmer has ability to write good code (compared to scripting languages and bytecode compiled languages), PB is a green solution to help to save this planet! Not a bad point to use in the marketing nowadays.
Because of the name (PureBasic) some people (too many) categorize PB as a toy language which should not be used in any professional programming task, they even not look what is under the hood before get an opinion of PB. Funny that same time professional programming tools/languages whose syntax is very "basic"-like for example PowerBuilder, WinDev, Progress/OpenEdge etc.. are used to run big business and business critical tasks. Nobody point that they use Basic-style language. Of course there is situations where most languages including PB are not enough, and need coroutines, message passing, lot of scientific libraries etc.. Then Erlang, Julia or some special tool could be a better choice.
Currently PB is very good, but some essential features still missing to use it in every project. Those are lacking SSL/TLS support in the network library and database connections. Server side SSL/TLS would be a super feature - imagine finally could create an independent application server, cloud platform services, anything server stuff which meets the requirements of IT policy in the enteprise market! No need dozens of libraries, container solutions (Docker etc..), external licenses, Stunnel or any mess, just develop, run and enjoy!
Years after years Raspberry Pi come more to the enteprise, although it is more known as a hobbyist HW platform. I mean IoT field in the enterprise. Inexpensive price is one thing which make this possible. Sad that PB does not offer ARM processor support. Imagine Raspberry Pi 4 IoT solution powered by PB application - lot of possibilities for any startup company if compare to Python solutions. Speed and protected code! For most IoT solutions TCP/UDP sockets are enough to connect to the cloud especially if a PB based server application is used, but if needed, MQTT library is relatively easy to write in PB or create a wrapper, sometimes REST is enough.
I have noticed that PB's development is not fast now, some features and bug fixes coming regularly which is good and keep it alive, but not enough to stay in business. I understood that money is the key reason for the current situation. But I'm sure that here is many users who are willing to pay extra to speed up the PB's development. Personally I can support PB's development for example 500 euros (or more) every year. I save more than that in time in one month when using PB, so it is a good deal if get needed features that way. Also some way to get priority bug fixes would be good, I can't tell to customer that the bug fix for the problem may come in next year or some year. If I do that, I have to say bye bye to customer. I have to fix the problem in days or weeks. Also some information of PB's future plan and goals helps the user community to know which direction PB is planned to develop in the near future. I don't mean strict schedules, but something more than we can know now.
purenet
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