I am in a quandary of what to do with EZGUI ?
Powerbasic, simply put is dead. I won't go into the details, but it is a fact and the chances of it resurfacing are slim at best.
So what to do with EZGUI, without Powerbasic. There is too much code for me to port it to another language, unless that language supports a syntax at least close to Powerbasic. I used a lot of tricks found in the PB language which would need to exist in whatever I port it to. Second, 64 bit is critical to make it worth the time to port EZGUI.
EZGUI is over 50,000 lines of Powerbasic code (with a tiny bit of inline assembler).
Is it worth it to port it ?
I think so. EZGUI , as far as GUI tools go, has features far beyond anything in the PB compiler. It is so complex it is almost a programming language in of itself. There are over 1000 GUI commands in it, and so many low level features is can be extended to add even much more.
Kevin Diggins BCX looks interesting to me. That may be one approach to port EZGUI.
If one looks at many of the "other" BASIC's out there (indie developed BASIC's), I doubt any of them come close to the feature set of EZGUI. EZGUI is also quite unique in that I wrote 100% of it from scratch. Not a single line of so called "open source" code or libraries. What ever I do with it, I don't have to worry about third party licenses getting in the way.
Languages like Purebasic for example use a third party 3D engine. EZGUI's graphic engine I wrote myself from scratch.
EZGUI has features very unique to it such as:
2D Sprite animation engine which is very fast and does not require DirectX. It uses the Windows GDI (using Device Independent Bitmaps). It creates its own memory buffers and handles all drawing via my own code and then Bitblt's the memory buffer to the screen. It is very fast. I benchmarked to Patrice Terriers GDImage (which uses GDIplus) and the animation was significantly faster.
3D OpenGL based scripting language. It even supports loading and displaying STL 3D models (used in 3D printing). It is so fast it can load and display huge 3D models with over 1 million polygons in a few seconds, even on a old computer and does not need the latest (bleeding edge) hardware to do it.
Drag and Drop Visual Designer engine (build your own programming visual designers, form editors).
and much more.
If you have any suggestions, feel free to post them here or contact me via email (support@cwsof.com)
