This project aims at making a graphical development environment based on a Basic interpreter, so that we have a language like Visual Basic™ under Linux.

Gambas

The package wizard in Gambas running under Gnome.

Developer: Benoît Minisini
License: GPLv2
Web: http://gambas.sourceforge.net/

Introduction

Gambas is a full-featured object language and development environment built on a BASIC interpreter. It is released under the GNU General Public Licence.

Its architecture is largely inspired by Java. So Gambas is made up of:

A compiler.
An interpreter.
An archiver.
A scripter.
A development environment.
Many extension components.

The compiler is a fast little executable written in C:

It compiles about 128000 non-void lines in a second on my own Athlon 2000. This speed allows a quick code/compile/test incremental development process.
It does almost no optimization at all at the moment, relying on the interpreter to perform this task at runtime.
It manages and compiles string translations by using the GNU gettext tools.

The interpreter is a small executable also written in C that is less than 180 Kb:

It provides all of the native features of the language, by giving indirect access to almost all the POSIX glibc features.
It loads classes on demand, optimizing the bytecode the first time it is run.
Linking between classes is done entirely at runtime. This is done as late as possible. So even large executables start quickly.

Finally, the archiver is a program that creates a Gambas executable from a Gambas project directory.

External Links

Homepage