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Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

xyplorer.com

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Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#221

Post by ucirello »

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 will disagree with this list, in part. And I am thinking specifically of PHP. I am an emigrate from PHP ecosystem, I departed from PHP 11 years ago and never looked back. The number one reason that I left PHP is that #1 in your list was plainly false. There were _not_ high paying jobs in PHP, no matter how good you were or not. The whole point of using PHP is to pay as little as possible; and make developers as fungible as possible. And if a certain demographic yielded good quality developers for an even lower price point, I would certainly see whole teams being replaced to fit it. I was actually recruited, more than once, exactly for this reason.

Languages don't die, they ride into the sunset. There is enough inertia in PHP-ecosystem that you can still find jobs, but they are very often just legacy work jobs (at least in my area). No serious technical leader would pick PHP to execute on new work, except of course, if their main driver is to pay as little as possible and the language choice doesn't bubble up to investors' keyword-driven investment thesis.

VB6 and PHP are nice. I am skeptical of the affirmation that there is a lot of money in these ecosystems. The pie may be currently large, but I do not see it growing.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#222

Post by VB6-Programming »

neverartful wrote: post #11
VB6-Programming wrote: post #2

The 64 bit version of XYplorer is written in the twinBASIC programming language (actually an import of the VB6 source code and forms).

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

twinBASIC programming is backwards compatible with VB6 (it intends to be 100% and is very close to that now). Existing VB6 source code and forms can be imported and run (at least as 32 bit apps.). twinBASIC can compile to 64 bit and has many modern features. There is also an optimising compiler. There is a free Community Edition. VBA can also be replaced with twinBASIC programming. Future plans include Linux, MacOS and Android versions.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#224

Post by VB6-Programming »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #192
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'll add a number 4: 5. Poor coding practices can produce unmaintainable code in any language. The pain of the maintenance programmer is caused by the implementation programmer, not the implementation language.

Very true!

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#225

Post by VB6-Programming »

KronisLV wrote: post #174
jcncncn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author has listed quite a few like unicode and 64 bit support ^^

Those are both good examples!

And the VB6 compatible twinBASIC programming language supports unicode and 64 bit compilation - and has a modern IDE. And it can import VB6 source code and forms.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#226

Post by bigtunacan »

odie5533 wrote: post #171
AlienRobot wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Never heard of Lazarus before. I used Delphi back in the day. Now I want to again!

Lazarus is an open source implementation of object Pascal. Basically an attempt to recreate Delphi as open source. Not bad honestly.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#227

Post by DanielHB »

nycdotnet wrote: post #155
DanielHB wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lasting languages and good languages, but there are no lasting good languages.

“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”. Bjarne Stroustrup

Although I don't disagree with that statement it is not exactly what I was implying. I was implying that good languages eventually grow into bad languages.

Usually happens through tacking on new features and standard API functions without removing old ones. I wish modern languages would allow different modules within the same project to use different versions of the language and be more aggressive about deprecating/removing old features.

So like if you open a module and see "version 3.0" in the manifest you know for sure that this module is not using stupid feature X from version 1.0. While still being able to use "crucial library not updated since 2003" without much fuss.

Most languages these days don't dare to change core syntax behaviour in order to not break backwards compatibility.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#228

Post by treve »

RajT88 wrote: post #207
treve wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel this narrative about less experienced developers probably made sense to you back then, but it might be time to update it!

This narrative was about how VB did not produce senior developers that understood how computers worked. Never observed such a thing with any other language. (Of course I am too young to have met people building business apps off COBOL or BASIC).

There's still lots of gatekeeping everywhere if you know where to look!

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#229

Post by ags1905 »

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…

We need more people to check out free pascal compiler and it's IDE Lazarus. The more you learn, the more you see they are excellent in many ways. https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#230

Post by fafalone »

nolok wrote: post #68
rkagerer wrote: post #29

Works on Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11 That's better than you can say for a lot of software these days

It's a feature of limiting yourself to the win32 api (and functions of it available since 2001 only). Eg the moment you need to deal with security like certificate or whatever this goes out the window.

Plenty VB6 apps use tons of APIs introduced well beyond 2001. I'm not too familiar with XYPlorer but it looks like it will support some more recent stuff if available.

One of my hobbies was writing demo projects showing the use of new APIs and COM objects. I have a shell browsing control with all of the features of Explorer; it for example can browse attached media devices like cameras and phones that don't even have normal file system paths and can't be used in older apps, because it's based entirely around shell interfaces and APIs not available until Vista. Another recent project was how to use the Win7+ Ribbon UI controls. I don't support earlier Windows versions than 7 at all in my personal projects now.

Security or certificates? No problem. I've written VB6 compatible versions of the entire BCrypt and NCrypt APIs covering everything up through the latest SDK, and people have written practical programs using those plus tons of other Windows security, crypto, and cert subsystems.

There's connection classes using the newest TLS versions. OAuth? Sure. People are replacing older in-app browsers with WebView2-based ones.

If that's still insufficient, and you really want something more modern, it's entirely possible and there's plenty of demos of using WinRT from VB6 and twinBASIC. XAML controls? Yup, people are doing it. We just had a big debate about the merits of using the latest Windows 11 RichEdit controls supporting color fonts directly vs using the XAML implementation instead, or implementing a windowless RichEdit with the modern Direct2D rendering pathway like the XAML one does underneath. Speaking of DirectX, there's also VB/tB compatible libraries for Direct3D 11 and 12 and the Media Foundation subsystem.

Just because a language is 'frozen' in 1998 doesn't mean it can't call modern APIs and use modern libraries. And now with twinBASIC it's unfrozen, adding tons of new language features and modernizations. Do you also think modern apps absolutely need the very latest C++ standards and you can't make modern apps in C++ 03?

Hell, I've even written demos of how to use tB to make kernel mode drivers that run on Win10/11, inspired by someone figuring out how to make one in VB6 that runs on Windows up through the last 32bit version. Since tB supports 64bit, they run on 64bit 10/11 now.

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