Does FreeBASIC Have a Published Project Roadmap?

General FreeBASIC programming questions.
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load81
Posts: 6
Joined: Mar 22, 2019 23:21

Does FreeBASIC Have a Published Project Roadmap?

Post by load81 »

FreeBASIC has caught my eye because it looks like a solid BASIC compiler that's fully open source and multi-platform. From a high level it looks like FreeBASIC goes out of its way to make it as easy as possible to port existing source code from earlier eras of BASIC to it. Very cool.

The only obvious missing feature seems to be native sound support. One could make the case that mobile platform support, such as Android, would be a huge win too. But, I'm not sure how well that could be made to work.

Does FreeBASIC have a published project roadmap? I'm really curious as to what is on the horizon.
grindstone
Posts: 862
Joined: May 05, 2015 5:35
Location: Germany

Re: Does FreeBASIC Have a Published Project Roadmap?

Post by grindstone »

Does FreeBASIC have a published project roadmap?
Alas, here in this forum those treasures are spread all over the place. But if you don't mind the german language, you will find a well-organized collection of code examples and projects on the german FB-site (partly with descripions in english). Maybe there are similar collections in other countries. And if you are interested in games development, have a look at this site.
badidea
Posts: 2586
Joined: May 24, 2007 22:10
Location: The Netherlands

Re: Does FreeBASIC Have a Published Project Roadmap?

Post by badidea »

I don't think FreeBASIC has a roadmap. There is a bug list, a feature request list and a todo list, but mostly freeBASIC developers (which aren't that many) seem to work on what they like (adding or fixing) and/or what is requested by many. Most of this activity can be found in Community Discussion. Current activities seem mostly focused on adding array functionality.
coderJeff
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Re: Does FreeBASIC Have a Published Project Roadmap?

Post by coderJeff »

Yes, correct. badidea, thank-you for providing the links.

Nobody is paying FreeBASIC Development Team (which is very small just now) to work on the project. We are not getting bags of gold to put freebasic in satellites around Mars, or autopilot your car, or teach kids to program in school. So the project development tends to be very organic (sometimes slow), based on the attitudes and feed back from the community, and as mentioned, what the developers are interested in.

I don't have a road map; only some goals for FB in my mind. I tend to think about it in terms of where would I like to see FB in one year.

Some of this, I think, I've posted about before, or maybe had email conversations with users, I don't remember:

- Developers: fbc will die without developers. My hope is that I can create an environment where users can contribute or previous developers will be inspired to return, even if for a short time.
- bugs: fix bugs. There are some 10+ year old bugs I'd like to see resolved, either with fixes or documentation. But fixing bugs is not development (or so I've been told). Nonetheless, getting ridding of bugs is a priority for me.
- new features: I tend to let the community guide the addition of new features, and so will become involved with new features from time to time.
- the 1.07.0 release (soon) and the 1.08.0 release (later), basically, about 1 or 2 releases per year.

More specifically:
- I had hoped I would completed several of my goals for 1.07.0 release sometime in fall 2019, but with recent work on arrays, I think will many goals will not be before fbc 1.08.0
- finishing the Z|W|U|STRING additions and bugs.
- continued improvement on wiki (which fxm is currently most involved in, and pretty much taken on all the work alone).
- getting the headers (bindings), all those files in ./inc that dkl (and v1ctor before) maintained, up to date.
- deal with the aging fbgfx library on windows 10, seems like it is doomed to fail at some point unless it gets some attention
- fbc on more target platforms, but supported by community.
- LLVM emitter - I have hardly worked on this at all, but it looks interesting and so much work has gone in to it, and looks to have potential for porting fbc.
- better tools for forum moderators, and more forum moderators (yes, bottom of the list, Imortis is very patient, thank-you).
...
- and all the rest...
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