PureBasic Forums - English

Anyone know what's Gnozal's situation is?

His last post was July 01, 2013 and he hasn't responded
to a PM I sent him. Hopefully he's just really busy or such.

I've got an app that uses 3 of his libs but I can't use them
anymore because they're not updated to 5.21 LTS.

I know I can revert back to an older PureBasic to use them,
but that's not really ideal as I lose the benefit of bug-fixes
of the latest version.

He is one of many that are MIA.

I like the libs of Gnozal, too. But two years ago I removed two libs of him from my projects because of two facts:

- I don't like to depend on other libs where I do not have control.
- I planned to port to Linux and Mac (what I did in the meantime).

No problem with Gnozal, but at least for professional products I would not rely on such libs.

I also hope he is ok...

Kukulkan

> I don't like to depend on other libs where I do not have control

Sadly, I'll have to take this stance now, too. I hope Gnozal releases
his libs as open-source then, if he's not planning to be around to
keep them updated. Assuming he's okay and not in jail, etc.

PB wrote:Sadly, I'll have to take this stance now, too.

I am taking a stance against third-party tools myself after making a $250 investment in a GUI framework that I can no longer get support for.

Hopefully, Gnozal will pop up. He was one of the biggest contributors to PureBasic. I hope Gnozal and others who have meandered off are all doing fine.

Sadly, I'll have to take this stance now, too. I hope Gnozal releases his libs as open-source then, if he's not planning to be around to keep them updated.

I use a lot of his stuff too and am absolutely screwed after upgrading to the latest PureBasic. And I have no idea how to work around 98% of his code. Gets me so depressed that I don't want to code now.

And I need the features of the newest PureBasic so what the hell do I do, or any of us in this situation?

I used no other libs except Gnozals.

Droopy's lib is an example of something done with foresight. He has lib, dll and source as well, just in case.

> what the hell do I do, or any of us in this situation?

I read once that we can create DLLs of our sources,
so I'd need to test it by using an older PureBasic with
his libs and making a DLL from it. It should then work
with all future versions of PureBasic, ie. future-proof.
I don't really want to go that route, but I'll test it a bit
later today and see what I can do.

Hopefully Gnozal will pop back like Sparkie and Zach.
Then perhaps he'll release as open-source because of
this discussion. Fingers crossed!

> a $250 investment in a GUI framework that I can no longer get support for

LOL!

PB wrote:LOL!

Fangbeast wrote:what the hell do I do, or any of us in this situation?

Can his libraries not be duplicated with fresh, open source code, by those of you who use it?

His libs did a lot of good things... it'd be quicker to get his sources.

Kuron wrote:I am taking a stance against third-party tools myself after making a $250 investment in a GUI framework that I can no longer get support for.

That's why I've taken almost five years to move all my code into PB. At one time I was using six different languages, plus three third-party libraries. Maintenance and ongoing support were becoming a major issue. Now, everything is in a single cross-platform language, and every line of code is under my control.

What's interesting is that the code has better structure and is much easier to maintain. And this has created opportunities for future development that didn't exist with the previous environment.

By stretching PB I've been able to create OOP-style custom classes based on PB's standard gadgets, while at the same time convert low-level code that was written in Assembler. All this has been done in pure BASIC code, with no loss of performance, and without using API or ASM.

The problem with third-party software is that it's a quick fix for an immediate problem. But it doesn't make the problem go away. Eventually it has to be faced head on. Unfortunately, it's taken me a long time to figure that out.

> The problem with third-party software is that it's a quick fix for an immediate problem

Amen, brother! I won't ever be using third-party closed libs anymore. It's not worth it.

I have used Gnozal's libs and they are superb. However, a lot of what they can do is now in PB, plus PB of course caters for x86, x64 and the other OSs which Gnozal's libs do not support.

I did a quick Google for Gnozal, his name appears in a few places (Total Commander add-ons for example), so for a self-described 'hobbyist', he has been prolific. I have not found any recent posts from him anywhere outside of this forum. It's possible that he his too busy earning a living to work on his code right now - remember we were all worried about sRod but he is back Still, bit worried that something has happened to Gnozal. There are a lot of home-base developers who live alone with their PC and may be a cat, dog or goldfish for company.

IdeasVacuum wrote:...remember we were all worried about sRod but he is back

He is indeed. Selling one business, starting another which gives me far more time for coding.

I reckon Gnozal is probably fine; just busy. A coder as good as him is probably in quite some demand, work wise. I'm sure he'll pass through this way at some point.