AvaloniaVisualBasic6

> The web had this before briefly. Back in the 90s and 00s, some people just wanted to use Flash. WebAssembly is different. WebAssembly brings every language to the web. Flash didn't. WebAssembly can render to canvas and enable applications that compile to desktop, mobile, and the web. UI libraries like Avalonia do this: https://avaloniaui.net/ For example, here's C# implementation of Visual Basic 6 compiled to WebAssembly https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/ and source https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6 And a Solitaire demo https://solitaire.xaml.live/ and source https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Solitaire But WebAssembly applications can also manipulate the DOM like JavaScript. Example frameworks that do this: - https://www.leptos.dev/ - https://dioxuslabs.com/ - https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/aspnet/web-app

How else am I supposed to use a Visual Basic 6 clone written in C# in my browser? https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/ https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6 WebAssembly brings all languages to the browser and that's a good thing. I can write applications for the desktop in any language, I should be able to do the same thing in the browser. WebAssembly makes that possible.

> I think Swing is a non-goal of this project. It could work though by drawing to canvas. That's what Avalonia does in C#: https://avaloniaui.net/ Here's a clone of Visual Basic 6 written with Avalonia and compiled to WebAssembly: https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/ https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6

> JavaScript is analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications. WebAssembly sees your analogy and raises you an implementation: https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/ https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6

> You still need to access the DOM, which can't be done directly from WASM. Maybe someday it will happen? You can access the DOM through JavaScript glue. These Rust WASM frameworks do that: - Leptos: https://www.leptos.dev/ - Sycamore: https://sycamore.dev/ - Yew: https://yew.rs/ - Dioxus: https://dioxuslabs.com/ Eventually you won't need the glue. > Okay, so use canvas instead and do all UI inside WASM? You can do that too. That's what this VB6 clone written in C# and compiled to WebAssembly does: - https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/ - https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6 > vague "JavaScript limitations" It's not vague. Despite 28 years of effort optimizing JavaScript, WebAssembly outperforms it: - https://nuenki.app/blog/bloom_filters_optimisation - https://jordaneldredge.com/blog/speeding-up-winamps-music-vi...

When you dig into the code you can see that the author did the bare minimum to have a nice demo. For example only 2 functions are supported: MsgBox and InputBox: https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/blob/383a005... Still it is impressive to create something complex like this in a matter of 4 days (looking at the commit history). And it is a good start to develop a full fledged IDE. The more advanced features like syntax highlighting & autocomplete unfortunately are missing. I did not run it (I am on macOS) but I also expect there is no debugger. Now I also want to share my childhood story: I started my dev journey first by using Turbo Pascal and then by switching to Delphi 7. Delphi was pretty much like VB6, you designed an app by dragging and dropping components on a form. My first app that I have created was a Notepad++ clon

It runs on Mac and Linux! https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6 It even supports dotnet's NativeAOT, meaning you can get a native x64/arm64 binary!

> Why not desktop app? Any sensible reason? It is a desktop app as well. It's written in C# and Avalonia. You can compile it to Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. You can also compile it to WebAssembly, which is what has been done here for this demo: https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6 WebAssembly brings all languages to the web and this is a nice example of the power of wasm.

This is an application built on Avalonia. You can compile it into a desktop application if you want (https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6), but because of the framework you get the web version for free. Seems rather ridiculous to complain about a web version of a hobby project just... existing.

You completely missed the fact that this is built using Avalonia, which means that you can run this on desktop (win, linux, osx), mobile (android or ios) AND browser (using wasm) with almost the same codebase. check https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6, and feel free to try the desktop ones.

It's written in Avalonia so you could easily compile a desktop version if you wanted, although the author doesn't package one explicitly https://avaloniaui.net/ https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6

Very nicely done, now a Delphi and I can finally be happy about the state of development again. Sourcecode: https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6 Edit: someone information about Lazarus deleted their comment, my answer; I know about Lazarus yes; I use it for my old projects. I would like a modern version that also works in-browser and .NET seems good for that as this shows. Maybe based on this https://pascalabc.net/en/ . Not kidding; I still enjoy Pascal/Lazarus (and common lisp) programming more than anything current; none of the anxiety and all of the joy and productivity.