I had hoped to add a transpiler to Gambas and YAB. Now I see that Dart Native already has a transpiler to C++ and creates native GUIs using Flutter 2.2 on my Linux box. Now I have to face a dilemma: Do I finish the transpiler for YAB or try to make a Haiku backend for Dart Native on Haiku? If it comes down to software accessibillity, Flutter is pretty much finished work on other platforms.
I guess the question is - do we need another tool kit? What does Flutter give that BeAPI is lacking? Will anyone actually use Flutter, or is it more a vanity(1) project?
(1) As in - you can do it - but why? Other than trying to get everyone excited about it, though no one seems to really care. I’ve done these. I tried to get Object Pascal on the BeOS back in the day. Pure vanity - no one really cared, save the 2 or 3 other people on the project roll.
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That’s exactly the nature of my reasoning. Google’s Flutter framework for Dart is already a big thing. Once people start to realize that it can produce native software instead of just WebApps with GUIs, I think it will be promising. YAB is used for almost the same thing as far as the GUI frontends go, but is Haiku-specific in much the same way as Gambas is essentially Linux-specific. I like RAD tools like Lazarus and FreePascal too but the only way to determine which will be most useful is to see which one has the most software. It’s time to start looking on GitHub. There should be some Dart software on there.
Search result: 5,335,096 search results all written in Dart on GitHub.
Search result: 45 search results containing the word basic written in BASIC. Depressing.
I think you need to be careful. I found 12,370 here: https://github.com/topics/dart
Dart-platform only has 5 : https://github.com/topics/dart-platform
For C# there are 8,669 : https://github.com/topics/c-sharp
But… DotNet gets 18,559, https://github.com/topics/dotnet
So by that metric, we should be porting DotNet. You can always bend the figures to support a pet project.
Flutter has 21,351… but when you break it down it has 18596 in Dart, the rest are all small (biggest is 361, but rest all lower than that.)
Basic has next to none, but that is mainly because BASIC is fragmented massively. VB or VB.Net have a LOT of hits for example.
The Topic links only have the tagged documents. I used the language:dart term and the language:BASIC term. Anyway, last I heard Xamarin didn’t use WinForms because it was closed source. I haven’t verified that but anyway, that’s a full compiler framework. The native code gen for Dart on Linux uses C++11 as a backend and compiles it with Clang.
- It would be good for the yab language to have the possability to convert yab sources to c or cpp.
- It would be nice for haiku developers to create gui things, fast with yab and do the rest in c or cpp.
- Yab help the startup developers
- Yab is native
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I don’t think any of that was in question. The question is what is best. Gambas is more of a Linux transplant but so is YaBASIC, the interpreter YAB was based on. After looking at the Flutter GUI framework, it looks like more of a professional tool, as does the Dart language. It has a different target audience.
I love coding in BASIC. My experience comes mostly from REALbasic (now called Xojo) and VisualBasic though I also have some experience with YAB because of BeOS and Haiku. I wish BASIC would make a comeback in a big way. If it could borrow some powerful programming ideas from the likes of languages such as Python and Ruby, it could be a hit once again. What I mean by that is, things I take for granted in Python or Ruby when it comes to easily solving a problem in code can take a little more work in BASIC.
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I agree! BASIC really gets the creative juices flowing! I’ve got 1,500 lines of code written in my YAB transpiler. I should at least try to finish it. What has been holding me back is that even C++11 is still quite complex and clumsy to debug. It has almost no safety. It runs fast but is slow to write. Haiku is 20 years old and is only just in beta testing in part, because it’s in C++.
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Well, no, they had a version for Linux and Mac. It was just too tied to Windows and never really worked well. They instead went the Xaml route and Xamarin Forms is based on a similar mark-up to WPF and UWP. Xamarin Forms will be Maui by the end of the year, and so it will run on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android (possibly Tizen, and potentially Linux.) Xaml is a pretty easy mark-up, and so it will probably do okay. With regards to Xaml, you also have Avalon and UNO, both of which are opensource and cross platform UI toolkits, both similar to either WPF or UWP.
WinForms and WPF are all opensourced now also. But I wouldn’t suggest using either.
One of Haiku’s advantages is its relative simplicity. Xamarin looks about a year behind Flutter and both Xamarin and Flutter are professional-grade frameworks for professional-grade languages: C# and Dart respectively. YAB seems maintainably small by comparison. Even Gambas is big by comparison to YAB. I suspect finishing YAB and even having some compatibility-breaking features in future versions will be easier than porting Flutter or MAUI.
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I never see any app or game written in gambas, i have taken a book about it in the past, but never see any easy way to developing with it. Yab is more easy to learn and handling, because it follows a logical way to write a program.
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Gambas is using a SVG engine, which is extremely powerful
Alone with SVG you can develop “games”
But i do not know any gane or app written in gambas
I am a graphical guy… not in games …but i do computer graphics.
I am not sure how good Gambas is supporting Scalable Vector Graphics … but if it would do just 50% i definitly would run for it
but again, is there any well kown application or game written in gambas? I know of gambas many years but i never hear any stuff written with this language.
well … you have OpenGL on Haiku …and Scalable Vector Graphics in Gambas… what do you need more ?
It still doesn’t compile. It does have a lot of plug-ins for Linux though.
Who are the people trying to port Gambas to Haiku ? - is there a contact possible ?
What I am mainly missing on Haiku actuallly is something like Visual Basic on Windows … and yes. Gambas could be an alternative.