As some of you are interested, I took some time to resume in a few words how all started and how I have ended up like with the current developper tool you're using. And sorry for my poor english
The background of PureBasic...
Let's take a time-machine to get back at the very start of my development cycle. I started programming in 1994, when I decided than playing on the Amiga was damn cool, so programming it would be even cooler. I bought the famous BlitzBasic 2 package, an all-in-one programming langage for the Amiga, which had an excellent reputation, due to the newly games which was just out: SkidMarks. The learning curve was fast, and quickly I get a little shoot-em-up running, following closely by a top-view car game (ATR like for those which can remember this great Team17 title). As I didn't have a graphician to help, the gfx was really bad, and the game was therefore not very fun to play
. Anyway, may be it was the time to try doing some applications. And at this time, a very important factor was arisen: Internet. Before Internet, you needed to buy magazine with coverdisk to have new software or extension, but with Internet (and especially 'aminet') all was here online, available at any time. I get in touch with several people by mail and IRC so I started to develop a little DirectoryOpus like application, named F-Bench (similar to MidnightCommander tool), still in Blitz. I made some great progress on the application side, and then a database manager (F-Base) is born, quickly followed by TheBoss, a powerful application launcher. Being on the BlitzBasic user mailing list, I quickly hit many limitation of the language at this time and slowly learned the 68000 assembler, to have a chance to improve the BlitzBasic command set (all commands had to be done in assembler at this time). It was quite painful, as I didn't have access to many good documentation and the forums has you know them wasn't existing (yes, Google wasn't working either
. So the NCS (NewCommandSet package) has been developped, step by step and thanks to the very positive answers/mails I got, I continued it during a year. It consumed all my free time (and countless nights of debugging) but it was really fun. It was incredible how many things could be done on an old 68000 processor if all was correctly coded.
During this time, the powerpc cards for the Amiga was sold and it was a very promizing alternative to the 68000. It was very fast, at a relatively cheap price compared to high-end 680x0 processors (68050). And then, some people wanted to have a native version of BlitzBasicII on PowerPC, but we all knew than the development was hold and would never be continued for the Amiga. So it was a room for a new langage which would be a the logic continuation of the Blitz with support of 680x0 and PowerPC processor. The early design and the first line of PureBasic started in 1998. The main differences against normal compiler was the integration of a Virtual Processor (which actually use the 680x0 assembly mnemonics) right from the beginning to allow different kind of assembly (or any langage in fact) output without changing the compiler core. Starting from this point, all went very fast. I was fully dedicated to the compiler programming and learned a lot during all this time (especially the C langage, to have a portable compiler). First version of PureBasic was out on Amiga and (even if it was deadly bugged) had an integrated and OS compliant editor, debugger and an huge internal commandset, you guess it, directly took from the NCS package. My studies went very well and I learned different other (completely new to me) language like C++ and JAVA which gave me a good overview of the actual languages available and then I could take better decisions about the whole design of PureBasic. During the fourth year of Computer Science diploma, the Amiga was considered like a dead plateforms and all my friends couldn't understand than I won't do a Windows version of PureBasic. As I tell to all of them it would be a piece of cake to do the porting, I had to prove it
. So I started to learn DirectX and WinAPI programming, completely in ASM, and these time, it was really hard. The x86 is a nightmare when coming from the 68000 (all the notation is reversed, very few register, no complex address mode etc...) but finally I got something working in about 3 months of work. Just after this, I created the french company which handle PureBasic: Fantaisie Software. A friend did the web site, and we were ready to go further.
Starting from this point, more and more people tested and used PureBasic for Windows and I get once more many encouraging mails which pushed me ahead. At the same time, I learned the indepth of the WinAPI and DirectX and this have given what you all know. You can check the History file in the help to see how much it has grown since, and what I can tell is it's not a standalone man work. A lot of people like Andre, Danilo, Fr34k, Roger (and all the one listed in the Credit section) helped me to improve PureBasic. The linux version was a logic choice, as it shares the same Virtual Processor than the Windows one (x86) and 'only' the libraries had to be rewritten. So I learned GDK/GTK and SDL, the other libs used are standard C one.
Here we are
It took me quite a while to write all this and I hope it answers your questions
. Feel free to ask if you need more details.
And... Thanks to all of you who made PureBasic a living language !
Fred.
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