I fell out of my chair into a fit side-splitting chuckling. Hey, VB6 is ~~free real-estate~~ Turing complete, although maybe just barely. If a quine transpiler between JS and PHP and VB6 existed, all things have happened, AI has won, and we can go back to typewriters and candles.
A TLS 1.3 stack written in Visual Basic 6
31–40 of 101 posts
Re: A TLS 1.3 stack written in Visual Basic 6
#32Kids today will never know the joy of "On Error Resume Next"
My greatest shame as a young developer was wrapping a Delphi application in an exception handler and re-running itself when it crashed.
Re: A TLS 1.3 stack written in Visual Basic 6
#33Kids today will never know the joy of "On Error Resume Next"
My greatest shame as a young developer was wrapping a Delphi application in an exception handler and re-running itself when it crashed.
Nono, this is called "let it crash" philosophy, you just reinvented Erlang and you're actually a genius!
Re: A TLS 1.3 stack written in Visual Basic 6
#34See also my experimental TLS 1.3 library in JS/SubtleCrypto, which you can see running live in the browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35884437
Re: A TLS 1.3 stack written in Visual Basic 6
#35Are there still working and available ide and compilers for vb6? Any open source ones? After working on vba for MSAccess for a few years I came to both appreciate and hate it. It’s fast, small in features compared to modern languages, but a pleasure to hack around and find ways to expand its capabilities. I made simple ORM with it, autogenerating classes from a database, went into the rabbit hole of modernising the d…
There are (at least) two project in development aiming to make a modern VB6 with full backwards compatibility:
Especially Twin Basic looks good IMHO. Looking forward to testing it on my old applications!
Re: A TLS 1.3 stack written in Visual Basic 6
#36Are there still working and available ide and compilers for vb6? Any open source ones? After working on vba for MSAccess for a few years I came to both appreciate and hate it. It’s fast, small in features compared to modern languages, but a pleasure to hack around and find ways to expand its capabilities. I made simple ORM with it, autogenerating classes from a database, went into the rabbit hole of modernising the d…
At work we created a vscode extension to use VB6. It's not a language server because it would need to interpret the syntax and all that but helps handling multiple projects, automatically cleaning registrations, checking vbp references and dependencies, etc.
Re: A TLS 1.3 stack written in Visual Basic 6
#37Would be great if operating systems implemented this stuff so every application doesn't need to. Every other internet protocol is built into the OS.
Windows and Apple does. Linux is typically exposed through OpenSSL or an OpenSSL equivalent library.
The downside to the OS provided libraries is that you are at the mercy of what the OS provides. You need Server 2022 or a relatively new Windows 10 build to have TLS 1.3 available.
Re: A TLS 1.3 stack written in Visual Basic 6
#38I’m seeing in-line x86 assembly encoded as floating-point constants, implementing what looks like indirect function calls (function pointers?). Is this…normal for advanced VB code? Does VB6 not have any other mechanism for function pointers?
I used to pass functions by just creating a class making a noun of a verb, i.e. I passed objects.
Re: A TLS 1.3 stack written in Visual Basic 6
#39This is probably the cleanest VB 6 I've seen. Do notice Option Explicit. That is like disabling 90% of the magic that causes unmaintainable code.
Wait till you find the assembly code hidden in a list of hex numbers that gets copied to a function and then called as a thunk ;-)
Re: A TLS 1.3 stack written in Visual Basic 6
#40I still can’t comprehend that VB6 had time travel debugging 20 years ago, and we still don’t have that with most other IDEs.
Don’t tell anyone, but I still think we’ve been terrible at UIs since VB6 and Hypercard. We mostly gave up on 2D grids as device resolutions evolved. We made HTML, then made HTML5 as if everything was a blog or newspaper with a navigation bar, semantically (and you still have to learn that the nav contains a bulleted list?) Unfortunately, it became a 3-hour or 3-year or 30-year process for someone to learn “how do I…
Windows Forms with C# still works excellently. Sure, Microsoft has deprecated it a bunch of times trying to push a new UI paradigm every year, but good old WinForms will never die.
The language is much better and the editor has more modern controls. Win32 calls are available relatively easily and the whole program runs quite a bit faster than VB6.
It's a shame that this is so often overlooked. At some point everyone seemed to have switched to WPF and that's when .NET cross platform GUIs seem to have died. There's a new tool out there right now but that doesn't work on Linux so I can't say I really care when WinForms will work perfectly on any operating system Mono has ever been ported to.