[HN Gopher] PureBasic: The Quiet Survivor
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       PureBasic: The Quiet Survivor
        
       Author : svenfaw
       Score  : 7 points
       Date   : 2026-03-01 20:15 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (medium.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
        
       | tredre3 wrote:
       | PureBasic is very neat. I bought my license almost 20 years ago
       | and I still use it to make small GUI utilities. It's a very nice
       | IDE/editor and the famfamfam icons are always comfy.
       | 
       | It's still alive because it's a passion project for the
       | developer, he doesn't make a lot of money from it. Not because
       | the tool declined in quality, but because nowadays efficient RAD
       | is a very niche market and the licenses are still valid for the
       | lifetime (again showing the passion to the product rather than
       | optimizing income).
       | 
       | See this interview for some details:
       | https://www.purebasic.fr/blog/?p=554
        
       | mikeponders wrote:
       | If you think about it, Godot fits very well and is very, very
       | cross-platform. It brings somewhat more but you can strip it down
       | to only the necessary, throwing away the 3D stuff and keeping
       | only what you use. It includes a scripting language and the GUI
       | stuff. Someone could actually build a specific solution with it!
       | 
       | https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/engine_details/develo...
       | 
       | https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/editor/usin...
        
       | avadodin wrote:
       | The elephant in the room is that, as all of the mentioned current
       | solutions render their own controls, there isn't a native-look
       | anymore.
       | 
       | I doubt anyone in GenZ or below appreciates the effort put into
       | making a native text field work consistently enough across
       | platforms.
        
         | pjmlp wrote:
         | They don't even get how we wrote applications across 8 and 16
         | bit home computers.
         | 
         | Thankfully they would never managed to run Electron.
        
       | pjmlp wrote:
       | On the PC, my introduction to systems programming and Borland
       | ecosystem, after some months of GW-BASIC, was Turbo BASIC.
       | 
       | Already a great experience with a structured compiled BASIC in
       | 1991, and what made me look into other Borland languages.
       | 
       | https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/Software/borland_turbo_basi...
       | 
       | Nowadays it lives on as PowerBASIC.
       | 
       | I don't get the downplay of Delphi or C++ Builder, other that
       | they aren't cool.
        
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       (page generated 2026-03-01 23:01 UTC)