Nice job - definitely consider implementing at least a little bit of the Win32 API layer! For kicks I tried importing an old highschool VB6 map editor at it which uses BitBlt but sadly it didn't work.
Best part of VB5 was that when you hit F1, you instantly got help for whatever was under the cursor. VB6 changed it to use some much slower MSDN help system instead.
- Xojo is a commercial tool which I believe does that (but with a price and license to match)
- MoonBasic seems like a promising start
- Gambas for folks using Linux?
- For folks using the very affordable PureBasic there is the matching (also commercial, just about as affordable) SpiderBasic
Naturally if one extends the search to other languages there are lots of options, but Lazarus with a .js Object Pascal compiler seems worth mentioning. For my part, I was swayed when flet.dev announced their v1.0 and so went the Python route....
The speed with which this thing launches in a browser should put shame on the faces of current IDE developers. While VB itself was nothing to write home about there certainly was something lost when hardware became more powerful. Imagine what current and 'recent' hardware were capable of if only efficiency was taken seriously again. Maybe generative AI can provide a boost where human developers would rather spend their time on chasing the latest fads, adding yet another feature or inversely removing even more functionality in an attempt to create the 'perfect' sparse application? Let the humans think up the features and write the initial implementation, then loosen the bots on the code to make it run as efficiently as possible on hardware which used to be current a few generations back.
The power relationship between the computer and the human has shifted since then. We want our computers to run slower so we don’t feel quite so inferior.
Are you sure? A UI based on instant gratification? Seeing everything simply blink into place instantly might not be as fun as you think after the newness wears out.
Anyway, if you really want to, you can emulate old OSs with a very fast modern computer. Some emulators even bridge the network and file system to support enough that you can really live in it.
I would love if everything on a computer were instant. One of the fastest programs I use is Sublime Merge for a Git UI. It opens and does everything so fast, and I love it. Since the first time I opened it, I haven't even opened the previous Git GUI I was using, even though I like both their UIs about the same. I had to buy Sublime Merge, compared to the free app I was using before it.
It's not just me who prefers everything as fast as possible, but true of people in general. Google measured that slowing down loading a search page by only 400ms caused people to do fewer searches. And the biggest reason I heard people say they switched to Chrome was that it was faster than other browsers (which was true for the first couple years after release).
Well, I’d love to keep talking about this but I’m attracting downvotes from the tweens and getting annoyed about it. I think instead about chrome what actually attracted people with a first impression was how much more reliable than other browsers, and that’s true, speed is a visible part of that newness. Eventually slow comes to mean reliable for people, too.
The less work something has to do, the faster it is, and the less things that can go wrong.
Compare a simple light switch circuit vs a "smart" light switch that's slow because your smart hub talks to some AWS service. Or a native app vs an electron monstrosity that takes 10 seconds to load.
Yes, I want my tools to be fast, not only for speed's sake, but because speed is a sign of simplicity and reliability.
> Are you sure? A UI based on instant gratification? Seeing everything simply blink into place instantly might not be as fun as you think after the newness wears out.
My memory may fail me, but I'm pretty sure ASP used VBScript, not regular VB. Similar syntax but not the same runtime/environment. ASP could use any Active Scripting language (the other language shipped with Windows being JScript, MS's impl of a subset of JS)
Here's something that will bake your noodle. Sage 100, the accounting/ERP software, is still to my knowledge written in Business BASIC from the 1970s—specifically the variant that ran on MAI Basic Four minicomputers (just 64 KiB of RAM!). This variant of BASIC was so, as Claude says, load-bearing that several companies emerged to support source-compatible versions on a variety of platforms as the non-mainframe business world evolved from custom-schmustom minicomputers to Unix workstations and PCs. The most common variants today are BASIS International's BBx and BBj (Java), and ProvideX. Sage 100, originally MAS 90 and MAS 200, was an accounting solution originally developed for those 1970s minicomputers and then forward-ported to new platforms as the business landscape evolved.
Yes, if you look at the developer's Twitter account they've shared a large number of projects in the past week, including in-browser recreations of Windows Vista, XP, 2000, ME, 98, 95, 3.1, Mac OS 9, Word, Excel, OneNote, Access, Visio, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Reader, a Git Client, a CAD program, a video editor, etc. https://x.com/wieslawsoltes
Looking through his work it seems that he has build a whole .net browser based ecosystem [1]. Pretty impressive its own right. However, for his showcase projects I was wondering how he'd prompt to guide these recreations, i.e. what is used as the input, I can't image that he'd describe every tiny detail...
I was wondering how he'd prompt to guide these recreations, i.e. what is used as the input, I can't image that he'd describe every tiny detail...
I thought the same way when I saw some impressive AI-generated videos not long ago, and I suspect the author prompted AI to get a basic idea, and then possibly after many iterations, finished it up with manual editing.
OK, so I followed through to the author's GitHub page and the project's repository and...
no CLAUDE.md, no AGENTS.md, no SKILL.md, no .claude or .agents directories either.
Dare we dream? A project this ambitious, done without AI help? I'm getting that feeling like when I see a piece of really well done art come across my feed—and it was done entirely by a human!
Is there something similar for the web now? Easy UI editor but a fully featured language behind with direct database access.
It was just wonderful. I owe so much to that thoughtful feature as a child.
I wish I could meet the person who decided that. You’ve changed my life.
- Xojo is a commercial tool which I believe does that (but with a price and license to match)
- MoonBasic seems like a promising start
- Gambas for folks using Linux?
- For folks using the very affordable PureBasic there is the matching (also commercial, just about as affordable) SpiderBasic
Naturally if one extends the search to other languages there are lots of options, but Lazarus with a .js Object Pascal compiler seems worth mentioning. For my part, I was swayed when flet.dev announced their v1.0 and so went the Python route....
Anyway, if you really want to, you can emulate old OSs with a very fast modern computer. Some emulators even bridge the network and file system to support enough that you can really live in it.
It's not just me who prefers everything as fast as possible, but true of people in general. Google measured that slowing down loading a search page by only 400ms caused people to do fewer searches. And the biggest reason I heard people say they switched to Chrome was that it was faster than other browsers (which was true for the first couple years after release).
Compare a simple light switch circuit vs a "smart" light switch that's slow because your smart hub talks to some AWS service. Or a native app vs an electron monstrosity that takes 10 seconds to load.
Yes, I want my tools to be fast, not only for speed's sake, but because speed is a sign of simplicity and reliability.
laughs in Amiga
And parts of their patient portal website were still VB6 on the backend a decade ago, not sure that's true anymore. Visual Basic 6 as a web backend.
[1] https://wieslawsoltes.github.io/Home/ecosystem/
I thought the same way when I saw some impressive AI-generated videos not long ago, and I suspect the author prompted AI to get a basic idea, and then possibly after many iterations, finished it up with manual editing.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1aIbRs2f6sVpCxO4TGoBf... (direction-log.md shows all the human provided input). It is far less than you'd think.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42105869
Was that there?
Does the site have intellisense? Yes
Did VB6 have intellisense? Also yes
no CLAUDE.md, no AGENTS.md, no SKILL.md, no .claude or .agents directories either.
Dare we dream? A project this ambitious, done without AI help? I'm getting that feeling like when I see a piece of really well done art come across my feed—and it was done entirely by a human!
Untracked.