The future of PureBasic...personal opinion...

Joakim Christiansen · Post by **Joakim Christiansen** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 2:57 am

Edit: This thread is from 20.Mars...

PureBasic is a excellent language, I just want to state that before continuing!

And that's probably why I want it to stick around!
But the software/hardware world is changing

And for it to be compatible with all the new stuff I think supporting x64 and .NET is crucial. Because then the only language you'll ever NEED will be PureBasic! I don't want to use any bloated Visual Studio Express software whenever I need to do a x64 or .NET project...

.NET is like a new Windows API in my eyes, even an API which will soon be supported by most platforms thanks to the Mono project. So it would be VERY handy to be able to support it because it will always be a part of Windows now. And in the future it could even make PureBasic more cross-platform.

And x64, well I don't even need to talk about that...

So I just wanted to know if there are any news about these areas? What will happen with PureBasic? And what happened with Deems experimental PB.NET project?

And then the question which will get me flamed like hell and this thread locked; why doesn't PureBasic move into a fully open source project? Because it's FREE then, and EVERYBODY will probably want to use it?! Then you earn no money?!

The solution to that is just to make a more appealing website and put some advertisement on it, tutorials, examples and I know it would bring a lot of money since the PureBasic page would become extremely popular then. But that's just my personal belief. I really want the PureBaisic community to grow and get even larger and better and I may be willing to help too, if needed.

EDIT:
And by supporting .NET I don't mean that all PureBasic exe's should require .NET to be installed. But that it's up to the developer to choose whether to use it or not just as we now can choose whether to use WinAPI or not.

Kaeru Gaman · Post by **Kaeru Gaman** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 3:00 am

first, before you all get me wrong....

I want to agree to the threadstarter in general.
yes, world is changing, at the moment in a mayor change from 32 to 64 bit.
surely Fred is aware of this, and hopefully he is that busy a.t.m. because of these changes.

additionally, I hope he is aware how THIN in the ice of "full-cross-platform-compatibility" of PB is at the moment and he is after it like hell as well! (only one exclamation mark according to my cultural state, add as much you ever want)

PB is a niche product, fine, and we only pay once and get helped and updated ever after.... at least we hope....

remember... I still love PB....

.net (dit-not) was first very disliked, but it really is getting common and also crossplat.
the basic principle is contradicted to the main philosophy of PB, "slim and fast as hell"
but additional usage of it would be a great advantage, maybe even with compiler-directives
'#on.net' and then call all the broadband stuff, and then '#off.net' and again burst your CPU...
having a "burn-my-cpu"-option in your .net-program maybe a nice advantage....
espacially for those programmers, who want to do really huge operations independant from event handlers,
e.g. like climate and astrometric issues....

x64 has to be added quite soon, or PB will vanish in a few years.

additional work on dotnet and other would be really helpful.
integration of all the grafical possibilities, esp. the 3D things...
would satisfy users who like game programming.
ok, perhaps you do not count on them too much, because those who leave already have payed....
....perhaps another price-policy would help, it was suggested also by paying users before...
maybe OpenSource could lead to a successful model....
...maybe Fred needs more Help, maybe he can't cope that good with delegating issues....
(it worked when handing the IDE and the Help to Freak...)

hey, Karbon, why are you programming in PB when you like .NEt that much?
ne, I'm serios with that question... what is it, that keeps you to PB....?

------------------------------------
in the end, I hope at least a few read my post wordbyword.....
I know its quite long for a simple opinion....

but this topic hit my mood this evening, so far I love PB and I love helping the n00bs,
and I love discussing about gameengines in PB...

but there has to come some change, or the only reason
for quite a lot of people like me
to stick around here
would be that we don't need to put on the jeans and leave the computer for the next pub
to have a beer and a chat about programming.....

sincerely yours...
DahOlFrog

Karbon · Post by **Karbon** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 3:27 am

I'm not sure why anyone would use PB.Net since Delphi and all the Microsoft languages already support it (I use all of them). What could PB bring the .NET developers that they don't already have? Nothing - I am a .NET developer (among other things) and can tell you that absolutely nothing would be gained by a .NET supporting version of PB.

Best tool for the job. I'd hate to see more time wasted on development of .NET for PB.

I've always felt that the OSX and Linux (and definitely the AmigaOS) versions were a waste of valuable time that could have been used making PB more solid on the platform that it's used the most on (Windows, by an overwhelming vast majority).

But, I digress...

dracflamloc · Post by **dracflamloc** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 3:28 am

x64 i can kind of understand, though it really makes such little impact for end-users (as opposed to servers) that its very low on my wanted list.

The 3 core versions are not even up-to-date with each other, with all 3 having their own unique fairly critical (in same cases) bugs.

The .NET version... now I just don't know why anyone would care about a Purebasic -> CLI -> .NET binary option. What would you create in purebasic that could be used in .NET seamlessly anyway? Purebasic is not even OO.

Not flaming you, but to me I just don't see the reason, perhaps you could explain why, in detail you'd want that?

pdwyer · Post by **pdwyer** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 4:02 am

64bit I agree with, but I don't think the world will come to an end if it takes till mid 2009 to come out. Everything's going that way and I'm sure PB will too but does it have to happen today? Provided it's on the cards for later I'm happy.

For .net and opensouce, could this be a problem and solution in one? I don't know what is required to run .net as a compiler but could an opensource .net lib be created by PB users that are interested?

It would seem that if .Net is too big a project to do with PB's Opensource community that the PB compiler itself as an opensource project would stand no chance!

I would not want PB to become opensource at this stage as I haven't seen evidence to show that the PB Opensource resources are up to the task of delivering a better product than we have today, I doubt we'd get better quality products or faster releases in the short term and if unsuccessful the product might just die with such a project. Not worth the risk.

If the PB OS folks have resources going to waste, support for .net might keep them busy. If they made any progress maybe Fred would add some new keywords to the compiler to help support the OO style. (not sure that I would use it personally though)

IceSoft · Post by **IceSoft** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 7:20 am

... 64Bit, .Net, OOP ...

Thats all great words... but what will you want to do with this features?
Yes right. You will write an own program.

Tell me what you can not write with PureBasic today... and you will see that are other features which make it not easy to write it with PureBasic....

.. it is not the missing 64Bit support, not the .Net framework and not the switch to OOP...

... it is more stuffs like:
... I will not make a list of features here...
...look around the forum and you will get lot of whishes which are much more important as the 3 words above...

Ahhh... Ok here is one of my biggest whish (Sorry):
...structures should be usable as return values....

pdwyer · Post by **pdwyer** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 7:42 am

Why specifically do you want to have structures in return values? What's the benefit?

You can pass a pointer to a structure to be filled just the same!

Procedure.l MyProc(In.Struct, *Out.Struct)

Return values are good because you can use them inline.

Answer.l = CalcProc(Val,Val1) + Calc2Proc(Val3) + Val(Str(MyString))

How would you use a return structure here?

In the top example, you could return an error value so you can do

If MyProc(In, *Out)
;Do Stuff with Out.Struct

It sounds great to have stuctures returned but is there really that much benefit over passing a pointer?

OOP I don't feel is "the future" its just a matter of preference, PB will or won't support it depending on their direction goals.

64bit is the future however and they will need to go there to servive long term. However, I don't think that day is here yet. It would be nice to have it today, its a good thing to get sooner rather than later but if it takes a while then it takes a while.

It would interesting to hear from the game programmers here as to whether they would prefer 64bit over an improved ogre support (or 3D engine or whatever it is that they feel isn't satisfactory)

IceSoft · Post by **IceSoft** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 7:56 am

pdwyer wrote:Why specifically do you want to have structures in return values? What's the benefit?

Look here... that is an example:

http://www.purebasic.fr/english/viewtop ... ht=#231846

pdwyer · Post by **pdwyer** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 8:39 am

Yuk,

Fair enough your request then to get compatability for something like that. Not good code (in the lib) IMHO.

If that kind of thing is the only reason though, I think a good workaround would be good enough.

But I see what you are after now

IceSoft · Post by **IceSoft** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 8:44 am

pdwyer wrote:Yuk,

Fair enough your request then to get compatability for something like that. Not good code (in the lib) IMHO.

If that kind of thing is the only reason though, I think a good workaround would be good enough.

But I see what you are after now

Yes a workaround is: write your own PB wrapper for a thirth party library like (Irrlicht, Chipmunk, Box2D, ...)
But it can be so easy for us... PB should support structures as return values... and lot of thirth party lib can be used nativ with PB.

And that is really a big feature!

yoxola · Post by **yoxola** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 8:57 am

Can't just use Visual Studio??

I use VB.NET for my .NET task with a project on a POS for my aunties's NetCafe, pretty OK tho.

I think it's easy to learn and don't have to wait Fred's .NET/X64 support till some time.

pdwyer · Post by **pdwyer** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 8:57 am

Is it that common then?

yoxola · Post by **yoxola** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 10:51 am

Not..... actually.

I think there's away to do it though.

Buy Fantasie Software, hire fred, and ask him to write PB.NET and PB64 for you.

bembulak · Post by **bembulak** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 11:27 am

Ahhh... Ok here is one of my biggest whish (Sorry):
...structures should be usable as return values.... Wink

+1

Good Idea!

Post by **Berikco** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 12:06 pm

This thread we see every 3 months...its getting boring.
And i think everythingh is already answered...search a bit...

X64: yes http://www.purebasic.fr/english/viewtop ... 554#223554

Dot.net NO, its somewhere in the forum

Open source: write your own and make it open source, you dont even like it yourself if ppl steal your work to sell as there own, and thats what happenend before with the only open source part of PureBasic.