PB over PowerBASIC any day of the week

Intrigued · Post by **Intrigued** » Tue Sep 23, 2008 3:22 am

PowerBASIC, eh... did not care for it. PB was much easier for me to approach and use.

srod · Post by **srod** » Tue Sep 23, 2008 9:55 am

Whilst I do not use Powerbasic, I still find it quite intriguing nevertheless; have you seen the new features in version 9 of the Windows compiler? Awesome. It has OO added, and without wishing to open that old war-chest again, combine this with the ability to easily create COM servers and you have quite an advance over the previous version here.

In terms of a straight Windows compiler there is now an awful lot to recommend Powerbasic (a lot more gui controls are now natively supported for example), but therein lies it's greatest weakness I guess; it's lack of crossplatform support. And with Purebasic going 64-bit now... say no more!

No, a hell of a lot of people swear by Powerbasic and I can see why. In terms of exactly those areas where I perceived Powerbasic to be comparatively weak when compared to Purebasic, the former has now firmly closed that gap whilst, on the flip side, Powerbasic remains very strong in those areas in which it has always excelled.

John Spikowski · Post by **John Spikowski** » Tue Sep 23, 2008 9:04 pm

I was surprised how much is still missing from the COM upgrade. It sounds from the posts I have read on the PowerBASIC forum that it doesn't play well with other components that aren't PB9 created.

No container support.
No UNICODE support.
It's much easier and with less code to interface with COM in other Basic languages.

Wasn't it Zale that said COM was nothing but "Bloatware" and even created a directive to artificially make the resulting .exe / .dll look bigger? He also did an interview a few years ago and ranted how he was on board with .NET and in development with the Linux product. It's hard to tell what to expect from PowerBASIC when you can't even believe what the author says is planned for the future.

I think PowerBASIC is at the end of it's useful life cycle and only the loyal and too lazy to change will continue to use it.

John

srod · Post by **srod** » Tue Sep 23, 2008 9:41 pm

I must admit that I was suprised by the 'about turn' in introducing OO etc. That was something that I didn't expect! Still I won't hold that against Mr. Zale!

Yes, the lack of Unicode support has always puzzled me. Here we have Powerbasic's native dynamic strings being composed of Ansi OLE strings! Very strange.

blueznl · Post by **blueznl** » Tue Sep 23, 2008 10:06 pm

Who cares... this is a PureBasic forum...

Rook Zimbabwe · Post by **Rook Zimbabwe** » Tue Sep 23, 2008 10:19 pm

(a lot more gui controls are now natively supported for example)

I had been thinking of a way to integrate more GUI abilities into the Win IDE and Vis Designer... didn't someone ask about adding tools to the VD recently?

Maybe someone could crunk up a .DLL or a LIB?

Retarding the Windows version makes one or two of the things I would like to do slightly more difficult... currently not impossible but slightly more difficult.

NoahPhense · Post by **NoahPhense** » Tue Sep 23, 2008 10:40 pm

Plus, it's over $300, even more, if you want everything:

- Windows Compiler
- Console Compiler
- DLL Creater ..

That's just crazy.

- np

John Spikowski · Post by **John Spikowski** » Wed Sep 24, 2008 12:27 am

The guy is still trying to make a buck off PB-Vision. (DOS GUI designer)

Haven't you ever wondered why you never see an ad for PowerBASIC? Zale redefines frugal when it comes to spending any money on marketing.

The guy would rather cut off his right little finger then give a promotional copy away. :roll:

PowerBasic had it's day but always being 5+ years behind the curve has eroded any thoughts I would have of using his compilers for new projects.

John

pdwyer · Post by **pdwyer** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 6:21 am

I took a look at the upgrade info too, I see that this time Bob has also put the help manual on line, we used to push that since v5 but he refused. I jumped ship just after v8 came out, I have it (and the long awaited 32bit version) but I don't see myself upgrading to v9.

The compiler has it's strengths, it's string engine is so much faster than PureB it's depressing but you can get around this speed block with raw memory manipulation but you need to write your string functions again.

I didn't read enough to see if they fixed the way it uses varients, it was a nightmare before and made the whole COM implementation a pain to work with.

They are pushing forward with that "statement" syntax too which I don't like as you can't use it inline. eg:

Code: Select all

Control Get Text hWnd, MyTextVar

So it has to sit on a line by itself instead of

Code: Select all

MyTextVar = GetControlText(Hwnd)

So if you need to do Len(Trim(GetControlText(Hwnd))) then you have to go dim a variable for it.

All their new code is going in that direction, DDT, GFX, COM

You end up wishing to have the time to write wrapper functions for the whole #$%# language.

Lastly, having console as a separate product is just a money spinner so I never bought that. With PureB, I don't need to!

I'm happy here, it suits me more. The community is also more international here where it's 90% americans over there so conversation in the "cafe" (off topic area) is quite narrow. (perhaps the unicode support causes this a bit too)

Personal preferences though

pdwyer · Post by **pdwyer** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 6:23 am

NoahPhense wrote:Plus, it's over $300, even more, if you want everything:

- Windows Compiler
- Console Compiler
- DLL Creater ..

That's just crazy.

- np

The DLL creator is the windows compiler. I think the console one can create dlls too. Two main products.

But I agree with what you are saying

Fangbeast · Post by **Fangbeast** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 6:55 am

When I played with this years ago, I had a look at lots of samples from their forums and coders that I knew and it seemed overly technical to me. I had just come from vb for dos/win at that stage.

When I found PureBasic and compared the two syntax and structure wise, purebasic seemed a lot simpler to just 'get into' for someone coming from VB.

The long commands certainly helped!!

pdwyer · Post by **pdwyer** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 7:21 am

Things I liked:

- register variables
- unsigned types
- structure passing
- string performance
- Good source code forum
- Peer Support (good coders there too)

Things I didn't like

- Statement syntax
- Poor internationalisation, very poor unicode support
- Variants and COM (could be fixed in v9 I guess)
- Not as extensible (PureB's libs mean there's a lot more that can be easily "built in", linked lists, odbc, sqlite, compression, etc etc and you need to invent includes yourself
- Licensing (PBCC)
- Religious Zealots in the "Cafe"
- Closed information policy about future direction. Closed (secret) Beta process

garretthylltun · Post by **garretthylltun** » Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:17 pm

The closed mouth, lack of information output from the author regarding updates/upgrades was a put off for me. As well, the stupid pricing scheme which was made to bilk as much as possible from a user by selling pieces of it separately. I still can't believe people actually got into PowBas and still use it. It reminds me of WinBatch. Which reminds, I should see if that's even still around, or if they choked themselves out of existence.

Pantcho!! · Post by **Pantcho!!** » Sat Sep 27, 2008 11:14 am

All their products maybe good to some certin type of people

but making a diffrerent compilers in order to control the market

and yes they are trying to sell hard and good.

the only worth PowerBasic compiler was the powerbasic 3.0 for DOS!

was strong and was the 64k barrir which was great.

other then that all their other products sucks, the syntax is NOT that BASIC

altough it looks like and their threading engine is (or was at the time) was good.

other then that Purebasic got everything these days that PowerBasic has to offer and the most important thing,

nothing can replace this great community helping one another
when i was there few years ago it was total chaos, posts are being deleted
people are being banned... pfff

I just love purebasic.

Tipperton · Post by **Tipperton** » Sat Sep 27, 2008 1:01 pm

My two cents:

John Spikowski wrote:The guy would rather cut off his right little finger then give a promotional copy away. :roll:

Not only that, there's no trial version either, you have to buy it on "faith" and based on what you see on the web site and forums and Zale is very careful to censor anything even remotely negative from the forums.

I started with PureBasic, then switched to PowerBASIC because of that "rosy picture", but once I saw the reality, I came back to PureBasic.

John Spikowski wrote:PowerBasic had it's day but always being 5+ years behind the curve has eroded any thoughts I would have of using his compilers for new projects.

Yup, its day was back before Windows, I still see it as a DOS Basic with some Windows trappings. Very old and rather dated.

pdwyer wrote:They are pushing forward with that "statement" syntax.

That's the DOS compiler they will not give up staring at you!

pdwyer wrote:
NoahPhense wrote:- Windows Compiler
- Console Compiler
- DLL Creater ..
The DLL creator is the windows compiler. I think the console one can create dlls too. Two main products.

Maybe, however I wouldn't put it past Zale to remove the ability to create DLLs from both the Windows and Console compilers just so he could sell a separate DLL compiler to bilk a little more money from you.

Like, pdwyer, I also have v8 of the Windows compiler and v4 of the console compiler, and although v9 sounds interesting, also like him I don't see myself upgrading. It would just be wasted money since I'm happy with PureBasic and would rather give the upgrade money to the PureBasic team.

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PB over PowerBASIC any day of the week

PB over PowerBASIC any day of the week

Meh