ScriptBasic 3.0

[John]

Has anyone downloaded ScriptBasic and given it a try? If you're not a member of the forum, an email (support@scriptbasic.org) review would be fine.

I'm still looking for contributors / developers to help with expanding the ScriptBasic's feature set.

[John]

It has almost been a month since the last post asking if anyone is using ScriptBasic. Should I assume I'm wasting my time supporting this open source project? Is BASIC dead and I missed the funeral?

[John]

Are there any BASIC developers out there willing to join me in forking ScriptBasic to OneBASIC?

Send me an email if you're interested.

[John]

I'm considering rewriting the DLLC (OxygenBasic) FFI functionality as a C extension module so it can work on Linux as well. This would only be available in OneBASIC.

[James King]

I think that what you've built here is impressive. I found the repository for the source code here - https://gitlab.com/scriptbasic   and have been reading various forum articles to learn more about the system.

• Is there any reason that I should prefer building the ScriptBasic environment from source vs. using the pre-compiled version? Is it a 32/64 bit issue? Or would the purpose to be to learn about the build environment?
• I have downloaded the MSVC-AIR.zip - is it the primary C compiler that I will want to use when building things to work with ScriptBasic?

[John]

Thanks James for the feedback and trying ScriptBasic.

The sb-dev-msvc repo uses the ScriptBasic build system that creates .h include files and documentation from the C source. AIR (co-maintainer that has moved on) created a standalone Microsoft Visual C and Strawberry Perl compiler tailored for the ScriptBasic build system. The build system generates both Windows 64 bit and Linux 64 bit versions.

The sb-dev-win32 repo contains a pre-built Windows 32 bit version of ScriptBasic as an installer. It was compiled with TDM-GCC-32 and uses static .h files. The 32 bit version of ScriptBasic offers extensions that the 64 bit version doesn't support. COM / VB6 OCX support and the OxygenBasic DLLC (FFI, structures and string type conversions) extensions make the 32 bit version a good place to start.



 

[James King]

Thanks for the description of the builds and the tooling. That helps out a lot. It looks like I will have to check out both of them! I have some COM automation to try out on Windows, for sure.

[John]

There is an Excel COM example that could be helpful.

The COM extension has a Display Type function that will pop a dialog showing functions, subs and properties for an object reference you pass.

[John]

I have two goals with the fork of ScriptBasic to OneBASIC.

1. Expand on the developer guide to give a true picture how OneBASIC is built.

2. Improve and enhance the error reporting including extension modules.

[John]

If someone would like to take on the project of converting the current ScriptBasic Developer's Guide to markdown and make it more meaningful, I could setup a Gitlab OneBASIC wiki project for its development.

The Developer Guide is generated from source as is the User Guide. The end goal is the build process would update the Gitlab wiki repo. It currently generates HTML from its documentation tags.

[John]

Since I picked up the ScriptBasic project from Peter, I have never heard one negative comment about the BASIC, only they wished they discovered it sooner.

Mike helped me get object argument passing with the COM extension wotking before he died. Mike being a BASIC language developer himself took a deep dive into the code. His comment to me was ScriptBasic was the best designed BASIC he had ever seen. I'm looking for the email he sent me to share.