Hi doppler,
Glad you have us on your radar! Oh boy, I've got to hire new material people. Anyway...
Actually, this is not a new board, it is a different site entirely. [abandoned, outdated and now likely malicious qb64 dot net website - don’t go there] just crashes a lot. This ,org site was originally created to put up when the .net site went down. I think I, and others at Network54 and the .net site, convinced the Three Amigos here to keep this place up for good this time. Hopefully [abandoned, outdated and now likely malicious qb64 dot net website - don’t go there] will be back soon. When the .net site goes down it takes awhile to get fixed. The time it takes to fix it is also related to why we cannot expect some of the additions you mentioned to be developed, what I term as a wish list. The owner of the .net site is no longer actively developing QB64. He rarely frequents the forum, and has to be emailed when it goes down. It goes down due to server capacity, something about the builds overloading it, so old builds need to be removed to free up space. I think I have that right, anyway, it just isn't a priority to the developer anymore. By the way, the developer of QB64, Rob, put this BASIC to C++ translator project and forum together as a solo mission. He spent over 10 years of his time on it. He has far less time now to continue it further. He might surprise us, but I think for now his intention is to maintain it and allow others to contribute to advancing it. The problem with getting others to work on it is the way it was put together. Rob admits he wishes he could rewrite it. I know how he feels. I put together 14 programs in QuickBASIC to run my office. That was back in 1990. I used those programs to help beta test QB64. I was able to join all 14 of them into one 80,000+ line program. That was pretty neat, but if I had to get others to work on it, they'd get lost in the code. So here is the trade off. If only one person is working on a bigger than life project, he has to take shortcuts to get things done and not spend a lot of time on rewrites. Get it working as soon as possible and working right is what's important. That's great, just don't lift up the hood!
I think what Rob created as a one man show is nothing short of spectacular. All I ever wanted, initially, was a way to run QuickBASIC programs on a modern Windows OS without DosBOX or some other virtual machine emulator. This project did that with near 100% compatibility, and works in Linux and Mac, too. I always wished Rob had made a finished project with just that, but he decided to add more bells and whistles. I have to admit I like the new underscore keywords and the other abilities, which are beyond what I currently use, but it's nice to know that they are there. About all that was missing was a way to run code interpreted. I made a simple line tracer for that, but Fell put together his VWATCH project which is the whole enchilada. (Sorry Fell, I was viewing pics of Trudeau in Indian garb yesterday, and I haven't shook off the whole ethnicity thing yet, argh!)
This is an open source project, so if you are C++ savvy and can stomach a helping serving of spaghetti code, have a look. Windows enhancements, mobile app building, I'm not an OOP fan but that's been mentioned, too. I think what a lot of people don't get is this is a translator. In 1990 I picked a language that I thought would survive the ages, and it was C. I just hated writing in it. Since this project essentially translates your BASIC programs to the C/C++ language, it has a lot going for it in terms of stability, all with the fun of being able to code your projects in dear old BASIC.
Welcome to the forum,
Pete :)
