GW-BASIC is open source now

General discussion for topics related to the FreeBASIC project or its community.
Landeel
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GW-BASIC is open source now

Post by Landeel »

badidea
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Re: GW-BASIC is open source now

Post by badidea »

Initial commit: 38 years ago :-)
caseih
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Re: GW-BASIC is open source now

Post by caseih »

The blog post about this is pretty interesting: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandl ... -gw-basic/

Apparently the interpreter was originally written in some assembly-like language and then translated to assembly for various platforms, not just 8086 and DOS. Sadly they aren't going to release the original, untranslated code, which would be really interesting to see. Microsoft Basic was super portable back in assembly days. So interesting.
badidea
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Re: GW-BASIC is open source now

Post by badidea »

That Microsoft guy seems mostly busy with converting Windows to Linux.
Landeel
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Re: GW-BASIC is open source now

Post by Landeel »

badidea wrote:Initial commit: 38 years ago :-)
XD
badidea wrote:That Microsoft guy seems mostly busy with converting Windows to Linux.
Yeah, but the whole DirectX 12 for Linux thing looks like a trap to me.

It would be pretty cool if they released the QB 4.5 or QBX 7.1 source code.
jj2007
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Re: GW-BASIC is open source now

Post by jj2007 »

caseih wrote:Apparently the interpreter was originally written in some assembly-like language and then translated to assembly for various platforms, not just 8086 and DOS ... Microsoft Basic was super portable back in assembly days. So interesting.
But not really surprising. The M in MASM stands for "macro", and you can do miracles with it. For example,

Code: Select all

Print Chr$("This program was assembled with ", @AsmUsed$(1), " in ", jbit$, "-bit format.")
assembles as 32- or 64-bit code, depending on a single switch. I haven't tried that with Linux (which I never used) but it shouldn't be difficult.
aurelVZAB
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Re: GW-BASIC is open source now

Post by aurelVZAB »

My question is : what we can do with this ?
I think nothing..it looks to me useless and pointless ,,,,reading assembly code ?
Ok maybe somewhere exist some sort of translator but ...?????
caseih
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Re: GW-BASIC is open source now

Post by caseih »

Nothing, really. Mainly it's for historical purposes. And maybe a bit of nostalgia thrown in. Might be educational to some people. Will it have any affect on FB or anyone on this forum? Probably not.
kankouhin7937
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Re: GW-BASIC is open source now

Post by kankouhin7937 »

Even VB6 is open source, i think nothing will be changed for BASIC world.
Landeel
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Re: GW-BASIC is open source now

Post by Landeel »

https://github.com/TheGameCreators/Dark-Basic-Pro
DarkBASIC Pro is open source too. It was awesome.
I left it at the time because it was Windows/DirectX only and I wanted to move to Linux/OpenGL.
That's why I changed to FB.
aurelVZAB
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Re: GW-BASIC is open source now

Post by aurelVZAB »

Uff yes ...DarkBasic pro was a really good ..
anyone compiled it ...because is open source now???
ehh i forgot about it ..
jj2007
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Re: GW-BASIC is open source now

Post by jj2007 »

kankouhin7937 wrote:Even VB6 is open source
Are you sure?
caseih
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Re: GW-BASIC is open source now

Post by caseih »

VB6 is most assuredly not open source. Which is a bit of a shame because I suspect an open source fork of VB6 would find an instant community and following. For all its warts, VB6 was a bit of a golden age of mini app production as it were. I don't think anything similar to what VB6 was at the time has ever come along since then.
St_W
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Re: GW-BASIC is open source now

Post by St_W »

kankouhin7937 wrote:Even VB6 is open source, i think nothing will be changed for BASIC world.
I guess that should read "even if VB6 was open source, nothing would have changed in the BASIC world." ?
caseih
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Re: GW-BASIC is open source now

Post by caseih »

And that statement I actually disagree with. Open source VB6 would actually be pretty huge, or would have been even a couple of years ago.
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