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Comment by CJKerr | Hacker News Reader

The VB6 IDE is distressingly easy to get running on modern versions of Windows - this is fortunate, since we still need to support it, but upsetting, since it diminishes the incentive for killing it off.

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The resistance to "killing off" VB6 is in large part based on there being nothing as good to replace it. Unless you're willing to pay thousands for a Delphi licence, your only options are:

1. Modern .NET for desktop apps, whose many semi-obsolete UI frameworks make Java's UI tools look simple

2. Learning HTML/JS/React/Redux/CSS/Bootstrap/Python/Django/SQL/SQLAlchemy/Webpack...

Neither is likely to appeal to someone used to how easily applications could be created in VB6 or Delphi.

(I believe this so strongly I cofounded https://anvil.works, which is basically VB6/Delphi for the web. That's not so much a disclaimer, I guess, as putting my money where my mouth is :-P)

There's also Xojo, which used to be called REALbasic. It's a cross platform (Mac/Windows/Linux) IDE similar to Visual Basic, with the indie developer community of the earlier Delphi versions, and a much cheaper price point (essentially $99 per platform):

https://www.xojo.com/visualbasic/

If you're trying to replace VB6, the only UI framework to consider on .NET would be WinForms, anyway. Which is obsolete, but still supported.

I don't see how Delphi + VCL is any easier than C# + WinForms, especially given that the latter is a GC language.

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