Category:FutureBasic: Difference between revisions
→Why FutureBasic?
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Considering the contempt some programmers have for the BASIC language -- "BASIC ruins programmers" -- it's almost a shame FB has the word "Basic" in its official name. Not only can FB handle BASIC source code, but since it is a front end to clang, it can translate C, Apple's Core Foundation, Objective-C (Cocoa), HTML, XML, SOAP, UNIX Shell, Open GL, etc. This makes it an excellent tool for prototyping -- especially for programmatic Objective-C when the overhead of Xcode is not needed.
And best of all it's free with no hidden costs.
According to Wikipedia, FutureBasic began life at the dawn of Apple's Macintosh in the mid-1980s as ZBasic, an implementation of '''BASIC''' -- the ''Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code'' -- which had been around since the language was invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College during 1963 and 1964. ▼
▲According to Wikipedia, FutureBasic began life at the dawn of Apple's Macintosh in the mid-1980s as ZBasic, an implementation of
ZBasic acquired a devoted following of developers who praised its ease of use and the tight, fast code produced by the compiler (a legendary labor involving extensive use of hand-built 68K assembly language code and the brainchild of Andrew Gariepy).
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In August 2005, Staz Software was devastated by Hurricane Katrina just at the time Apple was transitioning from Motorola PPC microprocessors to Intel chips. FB development slowed almost to a standstill. On January 1, 2008, Staz Software announced that FB would henceforth be freeware and FB4 with FBtoC 1.0 was made available.
Since that time, an independent team of volunteer developers initially lead by Purves continued to improve FBtoC, which took code produced by the FB Editor and translated it to C for processing by gcc
On Sunday, June 3, 2012, members of the FB List Serve were notified that Robert Purves had died after a long bout with cancer. The news came as a surprise to many FB developers who were unaware of Purves' illness. While coping with cancer, he continued as an active member of the FB community, improving FB, answering questions, solving problems, and posting exquisitely terse code often salted with pithy remarks from his wonderfully dry humor. He never mentioned his health problems and never complained. A tribute to Purves can be found at the bottom of the FB Home Page
CocoaUI, a collection of header classes that bring ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) to FB, and a fast 64-bit Editor offering syntax highlighting, line numbers and variety of programmer conveniences have since been added to the IDE.
When Apple released Macs running on the ARM M1 chips in early 2021, FB and FBtoC were integrated into a single app that was updated to allow code to be compiled on both the Intel and M1 platforms.
FB has a small but dedicated group of programmers ranging from amateurs to commercial developers. For more information visit the FB home page at:
[[FB Home Page:http://www.brilorsoftware.com/fb/pages/home.html]]
Also, there is an active and friendly support list where questions are welcomed and help readily available without a critical eye. (Note: List archives are free for viewing, but registration is required to post to the list):
[[FB Support Group:https://freegroups.net/groups/futurebasic/0read.html]]
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