twinBASIC Update: August 27, 2023

On April 23, 2021, I helped Wayne Phillips introduce the world to twinBASIC at the Access DevCon Vienna conference.  I boldly predicted that twinBASIC (along with the Monaco editor) would replace VBA and its outdated development environment by 2025.  With that goal in mind, this weekly update is my attempt to keep the project fresh in the minds of the VBA development community.

Every Sunday, I will be providing updates on the status of the project, linking to new articles discussing twinBASIC, and generally trying to increase engagement with the project.  If you come across items that should be included here, tweet me @NoLongerSet or email me at mike at nolongerset dot com.

Here are some links to get involved with the project:

• Custom twinBASIC IDE Installation Guide
• GitHub Issue Tracker (report bugs)
• twinBASIC Discord Server (chat about the project)
• twinBASIC/VBx LinkedIn Group

Highlights

Debug Console Improvements

The debug console got some love this week, with improvements in capacity, configurability, and–most importantly–performance:

• Support for unlimited history (was 1,000 lines)
• Auto-scroll toggle button added
• History no longer affects overall IDE performance, regardless of size

Discord Chat Summary

^{* Auto-generated via Claude-2-100k on poe.com}

Here are some key highlights from the Discord conversation about twinBASIC:

• fafalone asked about differences in division operator evaluation between C++, VB, and twinBASIC that could cause rendering issues when porting code.
• There was discussion around the lowest Windows version that twinBASIC EXEs can run on. fafalone tested Windows 2000 but ran into issues, though 2000 and XP are officially supported.
• waynephillipsea mentioned he will be less active as he is moving houses. Others wished him well.
• nextkast reported a bug found with dirListBox that fafalone was able to confirm.
• fafalone and .garymiller discussed memory issues in twinBASIC, including out of memory errors and memory leaks. Restarting the compiler and exiting/reopening the IDE were suggested as workarounds.
• fafalone tried using property sheets from twinBASIC but found they seem impossible to use, similar to VB6.

Overall, the conversation centered around debugging, compatibility, memory management, and user activity updates related to the development of twinBASIC.

Around the Web

Nothing new to report this week.

Changelog

Here are the updates from the past week.  You can also find this information by visiting the GitHub twinBASIC Releases page.

WARNING: The following issue is present in BETA builds 202 - 3xx (the latest build as of publication):

• there are known memory leaks in these versions, so memory usage will be higher than normal

BETA 383

• improved: debug console is no longer limited to 1000 lines of history (unlimited)
• improved: debug console history no longer affects overall IDE performance, regardless of history size
• added: debug console auto-scroll toggle button
• fixed: some internal issues in handling of LLVM compilations involving some SSE/AVX constants