Why not FreeBASIC?

hermes1 · Post by **hermes1** » Fri Dec 25, 2020 7:56 pm

Hello everyone!

I was just curious - since there has been some discussion over licensing BASIC and related stuff - why not use FreeBASIC (https://www.freebasic.net)? It's licensed under GNU General Public License and actively developed by the community. In contrast to any commercially licensed product, it has a great potential when it comes to community involvement. I might be missing something, but it really does seem like a perfect fit for the purpose - doesn't it?

With best regards,

Michael

[email protected] · Post by **[email protected]** » Fri Dec 25, 2020 11:39 pm

I've been browsing the free basic documentation... Does it currently support the 6502 processor, or would it require porting?

Fnord42 · Post by **Fnord42** » Sat Dec 26, 2020 10:49 am

On the website, it says:

Quote

FreeBASIC is a self-hosting compiler which makes use of the GNU binutils programming tools as backends [...]

Which makes me seriously doubt that it could be made to run reasonably well on an 8MHz system with 2MB RAM.

desertfish · Post by **desertfish** » Sat Dec 26, 2020 11:14 am

To put certain things into perspective, the page just listing all the keywords alone takes up more than 7 kilobyte...

It looks to be a very powerful basic (just look at the number of keywords) and from what I see the compiler itself is also written in Freebasic itself. Remarkable.

John Chow Seymour · Post by **John Chow Seymour** » Sat Dec 26, 2020 3:35 pm

Wow, I've never seen a BASIC with double-underscore keywords before. That's more d'unders than Python!

FreeBASIC looks pretty awesome. The world needs a better 'modern' BASIC than MS VBA?.

For the reasons others have mentioned, it wouldn't be a good choice for the X16, at least not as the built-in BASIC. Porting a processor-appropriate version of it might be a fun challenge for someone, though.

Fnord42 · Post by **Fnord42** » Sat Dec 26, 2020 8:32 pm

I wonder how it compares to the Color Maximite's BASIC.

(I don't know much about either, but it seems both are pretty powerful.)

hermes1 · Post by **hermes1** » Mon Dec 28, 2020 2:35 pm

Thanks for the comments. Fair points - it'd probably require some porting and a whole lot of adjustments to support the limited hardware specs. Anyway, it would be great to have the X16 run on free/libre software which is unlikely since parts of it had to be licensed, although I haven't found any info on what the license terms would be.

Fnord42 · Post by **Fnord42** » Mon Dec 28, 2020 5:46 pm

As far as I can see, it should be absolutely possible to build a free/libre open source firmware for the X16 and also use it with the final hardware.

This might be a fun project. Compatibility with software that uses Kernal functions might be an issue though; I don't know how much work it would be to reimplement the API.