Lbbooster for SDL

[neuropsychddx]

Dear Russell,

LB is an easy dialect to use, but of late it has become stagnant. For future generations, consider creating lbbooster for Bbc for SDL.

You may also consider open-sourcing lbbooster so that it can be transpiled to other platforms.

Regards

[guest]

LB is an easy dialect to use, but of late it has become stagnant. For future generations, consider creating lbbooster for Bbc for SDL.

The main problem with that is Liberty BASICs dependence on Windows. The GUI features of the language (particularly the various window types such as dialog boxes and popup windows) are implemented as thin wrappers around standard Windows GUI controls, all the 'heavy lifting' is done by Windows. So those features are very non-portable.

Carl Gundel (the author of Liberty BASIC) faces exactly the same issue with Liberty BASIC 5, and I believe he has attempted to code similar GUI features in SmallTalk. I don't know how successful this has been, nor how compatible with LB4 he has been able to make it, but it must have been a huge amount of work which would need to be duplicated in BBC BASIC to create a 'LBB for SDL'.

You may also consider open-sourcing lbbooster so that it can be transpiled to other platforms.

One reason why I have been reluctant to do that is the code within LBB for 'reverse engineering' LB's .TKN files. It would not be legitimate to make that Open Source, since it is a security feature (whereas LBB itself can only decode a TKN file if the originator's ID and Password are entered, publishing the code would permit that without those credentials being known).

I could perhaps consider putting the LBB source code into the Public Domain with that section redacted.

[neuropsychddx]

but it must have been a huge amount of work which would need to be duplicated in BBC BASIC to create a 'LBB for SDL'.

Can we move away to some cross platform toolkits like iup or fltk or wxWidgets?

I could perhaps consider putting the LBB source code into the Public Domain with that section redacted.

This would really benefit the BASIC community in creating a transpiler.

[guest]

Can we move away to some cross platform toolkits like iup or fltk or wxWidgets?

There are some GUI toolkits that are designed specifically to work with SDL 2 but I don't know how compatible any of them are with the Windows GUI.

There's also the issue of how easily they could be interfaced with BBC BASIC. If they rely on callbacks, which seems probable, this is a particularly tricky issue. Whilst BBC BASIC for Windows supports callbacks, BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0 doesn't; partly because of the variety of different ABIs that would need to be supported, and partly because BBCSDL is coded in C (the BB4W callback library relies on assembler code).

In any case with my poor, and deteriorating, health it won't be me who investigates any of this.