twinBASIC Update: May 16, 2021

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  I boldly predicted that twinBASIC (along with the Monaco editor) would replace VBA and its outdated development environment by 2025.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.

Highlights

It was a relatively quiet week in terms of new features for twinBASIC.  The two new version releases were mainly bug fixes.  

The bug fixes mainly dealt with improving the stability of the compiler.  These types of releases are not as exciting as the implementation of new features, but they are arguably more important to the long-term success of the project.  More than anything, a programming language and its compiler need to be rock-solid.  There is nothing more frustrating than hitting a wall that you can't program around because there is a bug with the language itself.  

Disable compilation of libraries

The twinBASIC build configuration options include a setting that disables compilation of your code.  This is a last resort type of option that you can use to enable opening your project files in the event of a compiler bug.  This should obviously be less of an issue as the project matures, but in the short term this is a feature you may need.

Based on a recent bug report, this setting now also disables the loading of external type libraries when it is enabled.

Around the Web

My presentation on twinBASIC at the recent Access DevCon Vienna conference is now available for public viewing on YouTube.

I'd like to thank the conference organizers–Karl Donaubauer, Peter Doering, and Philipp Stiefel–for helping promote twinBASIC by making this session publicly available.

Due to a technical issue, the beginning part of the video had to be re-recorded at a later date.  Peter and I had a one-on-one session in the week following the conference where I presented the first few slides to an audience of one.  I believe Karl is the one who spliced the two videos together.  Whoever it was, they did a great job as it took me awhile to find the splice (and I knew where to look).

Changelog

Here are the updates from the past week.  You can also find this information by installing the twinBASIC VS Code extension and clicking on the Changelog tab of the extension page:

[v0.9.2720, 10th May 2021]

• fixed: codegen compilation issue when array accessors were field values or global values
• fixed: overrides the changed default since VS Code 1.56 update of the debug.openDebug setting at the workspace level, once only (see https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/commit/1f06361cd3614382e47994e4a16f1c02b15dc964)
• fixed: edge case of bad code causing compiler crash on parsing [ https://github.com/WaynePhillipsEA/twinbasic/issues/133 ]

[v0.9.2713, 10th May 2021]

• fixed: nested single line if statements [ https://github.com/WaynePhillipsEA/twinbasic/issues/129 ]
• improved: disabling the compiler in the build configuration will now also disable type library loading [ https://github.com/WaynePhillipsEA/twinbasic/issues/128 ]