Loss of momentum?

[HanPBF]

"Desktop app built with JS": smartclient and dojo and some more are very mature. But I guess there will soon be some more like ZebKit (GUI based on htmlCanvas; don't know if SB does it this way).

"Syntax proc...endProc, begin...end, {...}": many people people today "draw" there tables with Word instead of using Excel; and I can remember years ago when I got first contact with HTML; it was terrible. In the forum someone asked if it is possible to have a macro called "{"... So maybe it's a big problem. I think the curly braces did win... PB is very verbose (having at the same time acceptable code completion).

"multi OS development": not so important in my case; but of course: tablets and phones with their OSes have shown that there is more than windows.

"pay for major release": 500€/year is a good price I'd pay for a good, complete development environment. Too high? (duckduckgo for embarcadero...)

The more users PB will have the more the PB team has to change something; and there were many proposals:
- kickstarter for more money
- plugin system for the IDE
- open source-ing PB keeping the kernel control at PB team site (there must be little OS that works that way;-)
- asking/let voting the people what they want instead of reading through the forums (I like the cintanotes roadmap)

I really appreciate the work the PB team does!
Nothing else at the moment feels so stable and comfortable.

There are some competitors -> Xojo, LiveCode; try them and You'll understand!
Or Java: I will never forget the way our admin looked when I did talk about this...

[Karellen]

The concept is not bad, but it's not even half way there. There are so many things to do until one can seriously consider it for web development - will take years.

Why do you think that? Once you have an elegant way to create a nice UI and you can send ajax requests to a server you're away.

I agree that SB is nice and easy for UI creation. But for most web apps things don't stop here. We don't know if, when or how server side related things will be covered (since the team remains silent). SB as an all in one solution is not in sight, and since one has to deal with (means: learn) other languages and techniques anyway to realize a real web app, SB might become obsolete for many users. Don't want to put it down, it's just my impression.

Hopefully the next version of PureBasic will give us a way of creating FastCGI applications so we can use SB client side and PB server side.

Yes, hopefully, but I have my doubts that it will be mature and stable enough to be a serious tool for (semi) professional web development projects before another thousand hours of development will be done. Time which I'd prefer to see in modernizing and improving PB libs instead. And yes, I'd pay for it!
And by the way: this already exists since a while as a third party product, which is working pretty well and is - imo - the nicer approach.

[the.weavster]

I agree that SB is nice and easy for UI creation. But for most web apps things don't stop here. We don't know if, when or how server side related things will be covered (since the team remains silent).

Web developers are used to the two ends of the pipe being separate, in that context I think SpiderBasic is already very useful.

SB as an all in one solution is not in sight

Kivy has shown it's possible to use Python + Cython to create applications that run on a multitude of platforms, desktop and mobile. Python also makes it very simple to create servers that communicate using JSON. I'm sure there's something that could be tapped into there.

[Trond]

Hopefully the next version of PureBasic will give us a way of creating FastCGI applications so we can use SB client side and PB server side.

Although a bit complex, you can create FastCGI applications in PureBasic with the network library. "Just" read the standard carefully and implement it: http://www.fastcgi.com/drupal/node/6?q=node/22#S3

PureBasic activity has always come in "bursts", it's nothing new.

[thinkitsimple]

I really appreciate the work the PB team does!
Nothing else at the moment feels so stable and comfortable.

There are some competitors -> Xojo, LiveCode; try them and You'll understand!
Or Java: I will never forget the way our admin looked when I did talk about this...

I only can confirm this statement.

I used nearly 20 programming languages in the last 30 years, made some very productive tools in C++, PureBasic and Xojo that are used for many years with hundreds of users, some of them selling good on different app stores.

One of my biggest and best selling apps was made in Xojo, but now i'm stuck in the process of building the next update with major UI-Changes. At this point i switched back to PureBasic which i know and use for nearly 15 years i think. The problems i have in Xojo to realize my UI-Changes are easily done with PureBasic. And yes, i also do not know any coding platform, that is as stable and comfortable as PureBasic.

In the last nearly 15 years of using PureBasic, this discussion came along nearly every year. Mostly from young people thinking if PureBasic is a good choice to invest learning time in. Hey believe me. No one is looking for a PureBasic Programmer. So if this is your driver, go with other, more popular languages like Javascript, Swift or C#. If you want to code simple or complex software on your own, then go with PureBasic.

I love PureBasic and i know there will be an update with some surprises in the future. That what we all know Fred and the Team for. Keep up the good work!

[HanPBF]

One said in the forum, the users shall donate to the team and not request price upgrades or something else...

But, donation for what?
As no roadmap is given, donation seems to go nowhere... (I know they won't)

We simply don't know
- how many guys develop PB further?
- is it done in parallel to another job?
- do they pay their lives with PB or do they really earn money? (Travailler pour (seulement) vivre...
- what does the team looks after outside of PB? Do they know WebStorm/Visual Studio, etc.?

Or SpiderBasic; as I said: very unlikely to see any advantage there (CSS/styling for PB?, prototypes for PB?)
By the way, just bought it, simply to be prepared and to support the PB team.

PB team, keep working!
No one really complains here.

My next step is using a JS framework (jqwidgets) with websocket to PB exe for db/fs access.
GUI is a little bit annoying with PB compared to DHTMLX or smartclient, etc.; maybe PB is simply not done for this.

Best regards!

[Fred]

Releasing SpiderBasic was a big work and proved to be useful for some companies, so I don't think it was a waste of time . It will indeed maturate with time and become more and more appealing. Remember of PureBasic 2.00 ? If not, just download it from the museum section of your online account and see what I mean ! Also keep in mind than IDE and compiler are very close between PB and SB, so when working on one side, it often benefit in other side. For example, we are now toying with a LLVM backend for PB which is much easier to do, thanks to the JS pipeline which is more highlevel than raw ASM one. It won't be in the 5.40 version, but it should be ready one day or another

Back on PureBasic: yes we are hard at work to ship the new release (which will be an LTS one - yes it's 2 years already). We except it to be out for a beta in august and final in september. It already has a quite big list of new stuffs !

[blueb]

Thanks Fred

Just having you or Freak comment once a month or so has a calming effect on the herd.

Keep up the good work

[skywalk]

Great news!

~we are now toying with a LLVM backend for PB which is much easier to do, thanks to the JS pipeline which is more highlevel than raw ASM one.

Would we lose inline ASM in this case?
Will we still get final parsed code from all XIncludes and expanded macro's?

Thanks for PureBasic

[Shield]

[...] we are now toying with a LLVM backend for PB [...]

LLVM does indeed sound sweet.

I had to work with it last year but the lack of good documentation made it very tedious.
Can you recommend any hidden sites I might have overlooked or did things change within the last year?

[Fred]

I basically use any example I can find to make progress, but yes it's not straight forward. That said, the results are impressive as only one backend rules them all. I will try to find a way to keep inline ASM working, may be trought procedure compiled and linked in a separate way (so the procedure will need to be 100% ASM). I can't wait to see if there is any performance improvement on small code test

[the.weavster]

For example, we are now toying with a LLVM backend for PB

That's an exciting development

[skywalk]

Yes, interesting problem. If the LLVM compiler has good optimization then the trouble is rewriting existing inline asm code, but without sacrificing speed.

[Danilo]

I had to work with it last year but the lack of good documentation made it very tedious.
Can you recommend any hidden sites I might have overlooked or did things change within the last year?

There is a new book, just released few weeks ago: LLVM Cookbook (@ Packt Publishing)

[kenmo]

It's good to hear (even a little bit of) news about 5.40

And a LLVM toolchain is exciting, good luck with it!