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Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

xyplorer.com

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Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#161

Post by neverartful »

jeroenhd wrote: post #117
nolok wrote: post #74

For no specific reason other than life random offers I've gone through a few of those "dead and bad" reputational language in my career (VB6, Delphi, PHP), mostly as a case of "there is a lot of money being a decent programmer who can use these correctly". And there are three things I learned about it 1. There is a lot more money in it than you would think. The good part of "there is a lot of newbie using it" is that…

Delphi is a funny one. Delphi applications certainly have a certain feel (and often instability) with them, but thanks to everything being a website now, they're incredibly fast and responsive compared to what we have now. Sure, they don't do fancy transitions and they look like someone wrote a Windows 8 theme for Windows 95, but when they work, they work.

"incredibly fast and responsive compared to what we have now"

Agreed! Also, typically far lower memory usage.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#162

Post by neverartful »

gramie wrote: post #22
neverartful wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first I've heard of twinBASIC. I'm happy to see it on the dev tools scene.

A dev tool with a monthly subscription? That's enough to stop me right there. An alternative is B4J, a free (as in beer) BASIC that compiles to Java, so should run just about anywhere. It also has * B4A - a free version for Android * B4R - a free version for Arduino and ESP8266 * B4I - a paid version for iOS The main (sole?) developer is ridiculously responsive and helpful.

They do have a free tier. It's nice having more dev tool options than fewer options.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#163

Post by graemep »

AlienRobot wrote: post #134
nolok wrote: post #74

For no specific reason other than life random offers I've gone through a few of those "dead and bad" reputational language in my career (VB6, Delphi, PHP), mostly as a case of "there is a lot of money being a decent programmer who can use these correctly". And there are three things I learned about it 1. There is a lot more money in it than you would think. The good part of "there is a lot of newbie using it" is that…

I toyed with Lazarus a bit and I honestly think it's insane it's not more popular. Instant build times for GUI. You want to add a plugin? Press one button to recompile the entire IDE. You can recompile the IDE from GTK to Qt. With one button. I think I'd prefer it over Qt Creator, for example, for building GUIs on Linux. The catch? I don't know Pascal, and there is no way to learn it. There are so many versions of Pa…

I am in exactly the same position. It looks interesting but it seems very much oriented towards people who already know pascal and/or are maintaining legacy systems.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#164

Post by graemep »

xtracto wrote: post #18
silisili wrote: post #13

VB3 was my first real intro to programming. Well, I started with C++ but abandoned it as an impatient child as describing a window in code wasn't fun. I wish we had a new drag and drop WYSIWYG to get people interested. Put Python or Go or even Basic behind it. QT maybe? Heck make it Electron. I'm not sure I would be where I am today without VB having existed, and it's a shame kids today don't have the same tools avai…

Have a look at Gambas3 [1] it kind of continued where Vb6 stopped. It's super useful for quick GUI based software. [1] https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html#

Gambas is Linux (and presumably Unix) only, right? A VB6 substitute that does not run on Windows seems very niche.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#165

Post by p_ing »

brokencode wrote: post #63
qwertox wrote: post #49

> No multi-threading. A pity. But for a file manager not that important. It's honestly blazingly fast in comparison to Windows Explorer on Windows 11.

As much as I like C# the language, I honestly think that it and .NET are fundamentally flawed when it comes to performance. Native Windows apps just never seem load that fast or work that great. It’s kind of crazy how much better the basic OS apps feel in macOS compared to Windows. I wish Microsoft would have gone in a direction more similar to Apple, with an AOT compilation and reference counting. JIT and garbage co…

> Native Windows apps just never seem load that fast or work that great.

On NT, process creation is very slow compared to most (all modern?) other operating systems, where-as thread creation is near-instant.

Not sure what you mean by 'work that great'.

> JIT and garbage collection sound great in theory, but in practice I’ve found them both to be loaded with footguns that more than eliminate any benefits.

I can't think of a single C# Console, Web, or WPF app I've created where I have to explicitly concern myself with JIT or GC. That doesn't mean they're not out there (games? maybe? Fez? Stardew Valley?), but I think you'd find one calling explicit GC methods somewhat rare, or being concerned with how long an app takes to JIT.

I used to deal with SharePoint Server quite a bit which is _slow_ to start due to JIT, but I didn't care because I'd just have an uptime monitor app fetch a page or few on the front end to make sure it JITs before (re)adding it to the load balancer.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#166

Post by p_ing »

IshKebab wrote: post #86
nolok wrote: post #74

For no specific reason other than life random offers I've gone through a few of those "dead and bad" reputational language in my career (VB6, Delphi, PHP), mostly as a case of "there is a lot of money being a decent programmer who can use these correctly". And there are three things I learned about it 1. There is a lot more money in it than you would think. The good part of "there is a lot of newbie using it" is that…

> PHP 8 is a top notch language Maybe the things they've added lately have been well designed, but did they ever actually fix the WTFs from PHP 4? JavaScript has the same problem. They added `let` and `const` but never removed `var` or `==`. If you take a look at ESLint rules there are dozens of footguns that could have been fixed in the language. Not as bad as PHP's footguns, but still...

What is PHP good for these days? What does it do better as a metric than any other language?

It's easy to use, easy to get into for beginners, and is a requirement for WordPress. But performance? Flexibility? Some other random metric-word?

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#167

Post by neverartful »

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #30
andsoitis wrote: post #3

I recently discovered Remobjects and their development tools. Amongst other things, they create Mercury, with they describe as a modern Visual Basic that can compile for: - .Net - JVM - Android (JDK and NDK) - iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS - Windows - Linux - WebAssembly https://www.remobjects.com/elements/mercury/

Is there any documentation or tutorial on how to create a cross platform mobile app using any of their languages? The value proposition is great, but I can't find any actual code.

Have a look at their github repos. They have a fair bit of sample code sprinkled about.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#168

Post by odie5533 »

dalemhurley wrote: post #108
mschuster91 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but did they ever actually fix the WTFs from PHP 4? If you have a background in C programming, most of the "wtf" is completely reasonable - the only thing "modern" and novice PHP programmers will still raise the WTF flag about is the standard library, mostly the string manipulation functions, their names and argument order. Old dogs know that this comes from early PHP being not much more than a thin wrapper around…

Then add in Laravel and chefs kiss. Honestly 90% of web apps could be easily built with PHP, Laravel, Inertia and React/Vue in half the time.

How is that any better than React + ?

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#169

Post by odie5533 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #117
nolok wrote: post #74

For no specific reason other than life random offers I've gone through a few of those "dead and bad" reputational language in my career (VB6, Delphi, PHP), mostly as a case of "there is a lot of money being a decent programmer who can use these correctly". And there are three things I learned about it 1. There is a lot more money in it than you would think. The good part of "there is a lot of newbie using it" is that…

Delphi is a funny one. Delphi applications certainly have a certain feel (and often instability) with them, but thanks to everything being a website now, they're incredibly fast and responsive compared to what we have now. Sure, they don't do fancy transitions and they look like someone wrote a Windows 8 theme for Windows 95, but when they work, they work.

Everything now is just a website in a bloated Chrome wrapper.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#170

Post by orbisvicis »

donatj wrote: post #157
IshKebab wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single language has parts that are a mess, or at least not perfectly designed. But that doesn't mean that languages all have an equal amount of mess. Python clearly has less mess than Perl. Rust clearly has less mess than C++. Zig clearly has less mess than C. There should be a name for the "nothing is perfect so everything is equally bad" fallacy. It's surprisingly common.

In Python, default arguments are mutable. That's the ultimate WTF and footgun.

That's somewhat of misnomer. The root cause is that default arguments are evaluated during function creation rather than when the function called. And... this is invaluable for forcing immediate evaluation of otherwise late-binding closures.

What can be confusing is mixed lifetimes of nested generators using `yield from`. If any outer generator has a shorter lifetime, when it is garbage collected `yield from` will forward `close()` to the inner generator. Attempting to re-use the inner generator will result in a premature `StopIteration`. Iterators do not have `close()` and so are unaffected. This affects only `yield from` and not `for i in gen: yield i`.

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