Some notes after my first PureBasic experience
Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2015 4:40 am
Dear Fred. I knew about PB a years ago (ten or around it), but didn't used before.
But recently I have planned some game project, so after checking a lot of modern languages stopped on PureBasic.
I think It's just great & beautiful (already wrote some complete utils on it to become more familiar), I very appreciate the high level of optimization, BASIC language itself, native compilation using good old FASM and many others stuff including full support for three key platforms, 64-bit architecture and other modern.
There are also Python, it has some advantages, but in fact just another poor scripting language, which is too high-level, too unoptimized, and misses compilation to machine code.
Also there was Visual Basic 6 (which I used for years to write small desktop apps, etc, and sometime still using) - it has very cool and smartest IDE I ever seen, also debugger/interpretator that allows rewrite code "on fly", also partially supports native and has some other nice stuff. But for now it is abandoned, very slow, no multithreading support and lack of many features that PB has.
I'm not describe those two here just for fun. Both of them with all their complex of minuses support some feature that PB critically lack as language usable in game development - yes, that is OOP.
I've read some time Fred said:
>It will stay a procedural BASIC, I don't plan to add class and such I think it will split the PB world in 2 classes (!): the one which have understood fully how OOP work and other which don't. Which means than you couldn't share source codes easily anymore at one place. Procedural and Object Oriented Programming are two opposite concepts and it's not a good idea to mix them in a BASIC language (which is intended for beginners...)
For that I want to bring example of VB6 which has partially OOP realization so far ago as well as procedural concept (mixed it all together). And it is language for beginners too (exactly "was", now it is almost dead due to MS desire. but you know how popular it was in 200x). So I disagree that newbies cannot deal with OOP, common usage of which (classes, etc) is even simplest than procedures and arguments/pointers.
The other meaning is that beginners anyway grow up and come to necessity of some OOP usage in some tasks - this saves time and efforts A LOT. You just cannot (almost impossible) build games like Terraria, Starbound, Minecraft (please take a look at them, they are old-school enought
) without using OOP. It is simply ridiculous to try program all the stuff from such games without using object system. So modern trends are all up to OOP, just no need to use it everywhere when it not needed like C++ propagates.
Another bright example of OOP usability from my own experience is "binary tree" algorithm. It is complicated enought to implement it using functions only, but using objects makes it work in a couple of lines.
And of course, some personal reasons. I just cannot complete my game (working single) in some adequate time if I try to make all the code using functions only. For now all experiments stopped because of that, so thats one reason why I'm here.
The second reason Is that I really loved PB for its speed and usability and lot of STL functions, but it lacks even basic OOP capabilities and this is very sad and bad (I've already tried some users solution from this forum, but old links are dead, some tools & precompilers I've found are abandoned and don't work with PB 5).
Well, seems that's all I wanted to say here about objects.
Please add some OOP if you still have some inspiration, I'm sure PB will only gain a competitive advantage from this and users will have more opportunities for doing serious things.
With a best wishes, from a far country Ukraine [and sorry for my english, not native-speaker :3]
PS. Also there was some issues with forum - I was not abble to register using local mail providers [ukr.net, mail.ru].
But recently I have planned some game project, so after checking a lot of modern languages stopped on PureBasic.
I think It's just great & beautiful (already wrote some complete utils on it to become more familiar), I very appreciate the high level of optimization, BASIC language itself, native compilation using good old FASM and many others stuff including full support for three key platforms, 64-bit architecture and other modern.
There are also Python, it has some advantages, but in fact just another poor scripting language, which is too high-level, too unoptimized, and misses compilation to machine code.
Also there was Visual Basic 6 (which I used for years to write small desktop apps, etc, and sometime still using) - it has very cool and smartest IDE I ever seen, also debugger/interpretator that allows rewrite code "on fly", also partially supports native and has some other nice stuff. But for now it is abandoned, very slow, no multithreading support and lack of many features that PB has.
I'm not describe those two here just for fun. Both of them with all their complex of minuses support some feature that PB critically lack as language usable in game development - yes, that is OOP.
I've read some time Fred said:
>It will stay a procedural BASIC, I don't plan to add class and such I think it will split the PB world in 2 classes (!): the one which have understood fully how OOP work and other which don't. Which means than you couldn't share source codes easily anymore at one place. Procedural and Object Oriented Programming are two opposite concepts and it's not a good idea to mix them in a BASIC language (which is intended for beginners...)
For that I want to bring example of VB6 which has partially OOP realization so far ago as well as procedural concept (mixed it all together). And it is language for beginners too (exactly "was", now it is almost dead due to MS desire. but you know how popular it was in 200x). So I disagree that newbies cannot deal with OOP, common usage of which (classes, etc) is even simplest than procedures and arguments/pointers.
The other meaning is that beginners anyway grow up and come to necessity of some OOP usage in some tasks - this saves time and efforts A LOT. You just cannot (almost impossible) build games like Terraria, Starbound, Minecraft (please take a look at them, they are old-school enought
) without using OOP. It is simply ridiculous to try program all the stuff from such games without using object system. So modern trends are all up to OOP, just no need to use it everywhere when it not needed like C++ propagates.Another bright example of OOP usability from my own experience is "binary tree" algorithm. It is complicated enought to implement it using functions only, but using objects makes it work in a couple of lines.
And of course, some personal reasons. I just cannot complete my game (working single) in some adequate time if I try to make all the code using functions only. For now all experiments stopped because of that, so thats one reason why I'm here.
The second reason Is that I really loved PB for its speed and usability and lot of STL functions, but it lacks even basic OOP capabilities and this is very sad and bad (I've already tried some users solution from this forum, but old links are dead, some tools & precompilers I've found are abandoned and don't work with PB 5).
Well, seems that's all I wanted to say here about objects.
Please add some OOP if you still have some inspiration, I'm sure PB will only gain a competitive advantage from this and users will have more opportunities for doing serious things.
With a best wishes, from a far country Ukraine [and sorry for my english, not native-speaker :3]
PS. Also there was some issues with forum - I was not abble to register using local mail providers [ukr.net, mail.ru].
