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Comment by cplat | Hacker News Reader

I'm familiar with PureBasic (although didn't use it a lot). I got introduced to it in the 2000s (2000-2007 or something), along with DarkBasic, GameMaker, and the likes.

In today's era, however, I have not yet found a need to use a proprietary language.

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PureBasic for Windows and Linux was released in 2000 (the Mac version is probably a little more recent, that for Amiga a bit older, and the latest for Raspberry PI is a few years old); a community got active in 2001.

> In today's era

In today's era it's still priceless to have a tool that * compiles to a native machine code executable; * is lean and fast - you can get results quickly and from a light efficient interface; * does pretty much anything (and in case you are missing anything in the native libraries, you can interface with external C libraries)...

And (subjectively) can be a real pleasure to use.

That's true, but still almost no one wants to pay for that pleasure. People rather suffer day after day to save 50 bucks. Not saying purebasic is solid as I have never used it, but there are definitely times when I long back to the times when I could pay a few 100$ and get something that was batteries included and vetted without the breaking churn of people just dumping libraries online and hoping for the best.

Please note that there are free versions, with code size as a limitation. One can test if it is worth it, maybe upgrade if the need arises for bigger projects:

https://www.purebasic.com/download.php

https://www.spiderbasic.com/download.php

Yes, which is why the rest of my sentence is important. I said, “I haven’t found a need to use a proprietary language.” I didn’t claim that one will never be needed by anyone. :-)

You could use Godot (has a nice set of GUI widgets in addition to the game-specific stuff) or Lazarus (Free Pascal IDE) for instance. I did not use Lazarus much, but Free Pascal as a compiler and the language is nice and stable and supports a long list of platforms, generating native code (including cross-compiling between many different pairs of platforms).

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

it looks like spiderbasic is from the same company as purebasic.

there is a link at the bottom of the purebasic web site to the spiderbasic web site:

https://www.purebasic.com

mdp2021's comment also indicates that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42349737

Yes, I’m aware, which is why it reminded me of PureBasic with which I’m more familiar. :-)

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