John asked me to share some perspective on BCX - so here goes.
From 1999 to July 2001, BCX was developed using PowerBasic 3.2 for DOS. BCX had been
enjoying a fair amount of popularity but in August 2001 the number of forum postings nearly
DOUBLED when I announced that I had successfully used BCX to translate itself, changing it
from a memory restricted 640k DOS application to a powerful 32-bit native code Windows
self-translating translator. There were a few bumps in the road at first but in a short time,
and with the help of some talented BCX enthusiasts, those bumps were smoothed out and
BCX acquired more and more strength.
Today, the code that BCX produces will compile on all the big name compilers: Visual C++,
Borland, Watcom, Digital Mars, GCC, MingW, Pelles, and Lcc-Win32. Most of the code that
BCX produces will run on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Windows 7. It's even possible to
use BCX to create Win95, Win98, and WinSE applications. How's that for compatibility?
Lately, you can even generate 64-bit native code programs with it. In fact, I have a
working 64-bit version of BCX. Not only that, there are versions available for generating
applications that run natively on Linux and Mac OSX.
I believe BCX will continue to attract new users because BCX maintains 3 principles
that I think programmers will always appreciate - generate quality code that executes
quickly, emit only the code that your program uses to keep code size small, and use
no runtime libraries that need to be distributed with your applications.
Learn for yourself why I say, "BCX gives you the ease of BASIC and the power of C"
