First experiments with FreeBasic

Desktop & Console Windows
1

Today I’ve decided to try out FreeBasic for a problem of my customer. The software supplier of his ERP software uses a bunch of services which crashes from time to time. Quite annoying and already topic of an ongoing discussion though the problem exists and the company with 50 employees needs a quick workaround.

So I’ve decided to write a monitoring windows service. Basically it checks the ERP windows services and restarts them automatically when not alive anymore. The information which services to be monitored is coming from a text file.

An existing skeleton (link) in the German Freebasic Community was unfortunately quite incomplete and only in 32Bit. So I needed a little bit time to translate and adjust existing C code from MSDN to Freebasic.

Bildschirmfoto vom 2023-03-30 01-13-21
Bildschirmfoto vom 2023-03-30 01-13-211494×844 56.5 KB

The result surprised me. The size of the 64Bit Single-Executable was just 56 KB! Without any dependencies. When installed as Windows-Service it needs only 524 KB in Memory.

Bildschirmfoto vom 2023-03-30 01-18-22
Bildschirmfoto vom 2023-03-30 01-18-22826×595 37.3 KB

Today Freebasic helped me to create a quick and small workaround for my customer. It is really awesome and with the power of gcc pretty fast and small in both, size and ressource consumption. I will try out GTK bindings in Linux and Windows next.

So far 1000% better than Xojo with its limitations and disgusting bugs.

2

Do keep us posted on your continued explorations, Tomas. This is interesting.

3

thx, I will put everything in a git repo, making it available for everybody soon

4

Current version is:

image
image1244×88 6.6 KB

Download Files

5

Another good 32 & 64 bit windows freebasic IDE on GitHub is at

It allows Linux, windows, and android builds. There are iOS and Mac ports for the freebasic binaries on side branches :smile:

Work on the IDE is active and everyone is friendly.

6

And you know what? only 18 issues…
How many thousands xojo IDE does have? Or places full of legacy you better stay away from? I think about the integrated database tool.

7

Some of this may be due to an even smaller number of users or something but I have to admit, it is night and day. Also it’s telling that many of this relatively small number of issues are feature / improvement suggestions – that is to say, everyone’s bandwidth isn’t taken up with a lot off problems with just getting work done, so they have time to think about how the product could be improved for their use case.