PureBasic Forums - English

I hope this does not annoy anyone, but I am about to take the leap to convert 3-4 100k+ line vb6 apps to pure Basic. my apps are distributed to end users (not internal business apps) with anywhere from 1000 to 10000 installed apps/users world wide.

Now even with my vb6 apps I do not publicly tell people it is written in VB6, cause it can be used against me... (the vb6 stigma)

My Question:

can anyone privately tell me they have a pure basic app that is of this scope?

thanks
WP

The Purebasic IDE is distributed worldwide with many thousands of users and it is written entirely in Purebasic.

axisdj wrote:can anyone privately tell me they have a pure basic app that is of this scope?

You probably won't get any private messages for the very reason you gave: Basic Stigma.

So let's face it
What is the use of converting 100k+ apps to PB ?
Expenditure is likely to be higher than the cost to recreate it.
In addition, VB is fairly future-proof
Sorry, but I think it's absolutely nonsense

walbus wrote:In addition, VB is fairly future-proof

axisdj was speaking about vb6 and vb6 is dead.

It should be much easier to migrate to VB. NET

I also don't think that VB6 apps won't be executable or editable on future versions of Windows.

The IDE is a complex multi platform app (150k line of code), so it can give you a clue. Should be no problem to convert as long PB provides all the stuff you need in VB6 (better check it twice before starting the conversion)

can anyone privately tell me they have a pure basic app that is of this scope?

We currently serve our services to about 50.000 people. As about 50% are using the mobile versions (Android, iOS), we assume that the rest is using the PureBasic developed client applications for the PCs and laptops.

Using PureBasic, we developed the following end-user products for our company (https://www.regify.com):

* regify Client (Win, Linux, Mac)
* regibox Manager (Win, Linux, Mac)
* regify Client SDK (.dll, .so, .dylib) (software development kit for Win, Linux, Mac)
* regipay Desktop (Win)
* regibill Desktop (Win)
* regimail Desktop (Win)
* regify LDAP sync tool (Win, Linux)

The core software is translated to English, German, French and simplified Chinese.

Other components are developed with other programing languages:

Mobile Clients using Cordova
Outlook AddIn using VB.NET (old Version VB6)
Thunderbird AddIn in JavaScript
regigate (SMTP Gateway) in C
Script languages like PHP and Perl are used in many(!) situations.

We have fully automated build processes using make targets (utilizing CygWin on Windows). For source versioning we use GIT.

Due to some various circumstances, we still compile all using PB 5.24 LTS. But we are just migrating to PB 5.46 LTS for all new major releases.

For this post I just did some statistics and found that we have about 60 PureBasic includes (mainly functions, some modules, used and included mostly in all products). These files contain > 50.000 lines of code and comments. The products themselves contain between 6.000 (regify Client) and 19.000 (regibox manager) lines of PureBasic code. The products are relatively small because they all use the regify client SDK (10.000 lines) and the includes. By this, they keep focused on the rest (GUI etc).

Best

Kukulkan

Thanks for your insight, always great to know about client software

Fred wrote:Should be no problem to convert as long PB provides all the stuff you need in VB6 (better check it twice before starting the conversion)

I see no problem either - from my personal experience PureBasic will handle large programs better than VB6 did!

I used VB6 (also 4 and 5) for many years and liked it a lot. Excellent development option that I still regard as one of the best products that MS ever made. I used it in a corporate situation coding in-house applications for one of the largest IT companies and then later for my own small business. However, it was not perfect. I was hitting some limits and the IDE had stability problems when editing my biggest project.

I was looking forward to VB7 but what I got was VB.NET Spent a lot of time looking at switching but the problem was that I just didn't like it. After considering various language possibilities I went for PureBasic and never regretted it.

My main application is around 33,000 lines and commercially released, though with a relatively small niche market. It was rewritten as a very close clone of the VB6 version. Took a long time, but well worth it. Newer versions have a few extras and improvements. Interestingly, the VB6 code had nearer 50,000 lines - can't really explain why the PureBasic rewrite has less, especially as the VB6 count does not include the generated GUI forms code whereas the PureBasic version does (did not use a Visual Designer).

My users are generally not concerned what language is used. However, I previously stated on my website that it was MS Visual Basic and nowadays I'm perfectly proud to credit PureBasic - as at the bottom of this page http://www.deeproot.co.uk/plantbase_status.html. Same applies to a different Basic product used for Android.

Programs written in PureBasic are easy to maintain, support and distribute. It is true that VB6 written applications will still run. I can't see that changing any time soon but there is no guarantee. It's possible to install the VB6 IDE on recent Windows, but it's a big pain! New versions of PureBasic have been progressive improvements on the original concept rather than radical changes. Also support for old and new OS versions is excellent. Fred has done a great job and appears to understand the needs of small developers in the "real world", which is more than can be said of some!

Fred wrote:The IDE is a complex multi platform app (150k line of code), so it can give you a clue. Should be no problem to convert as long PB provides all the stuff you need in VB6 (better check it twice before starting the conversion)

Thanks for the reply Fred....

So the stuff I need:
Send data out to FTDI chip
Receive and Send MIDI
Draw pretty Buttons
Keep code organized in classes. I just use them as data holders and functions for that data, no inheritance, only object composition ( would like to know your suggestion on this)
Write and read files to persist app data
fast and native ( I know you have this covered)

Pretty simple, just large projects. Fred, is there anything you can warn me about that may be an issue

Thank you for taking the time to respond. I will PM you my two main products I would like to convert.

WP

anyone using http://www.rsbasic.de/backupprogramme/Manual.pdf

http://www.rsbasic.de/backups/

SimpleOOP, looks like an easy plug and play solution, feedback and suggestions welcome

WP

SimpleOOP is a OOP plugin for PB and was developed by Sirhc.ITI (German user) in 2009 but the project was stopped in 2013. The user Sirhc.ITI is no longer available.
But this project is open source and is available here: http://www.rsbasic.de/backupprogramme/SimpleOOP.rar