ignoring price/licensing, what sorts of capability differences have you observed between xojo and purebasic/spiderbasic? i primarily build for mobile, but i do have to build some desktop, as well
my opinion… if you main platform is macOS and iOS, forget any/all of those, and just use Swift, it is optimized for those platforms, it is NOT that steep a learning curve, and oh, did I mention? ITS FREE
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It’s a pretty broad question – there are a lot of differences. A few particularly I’ve noticed:
- OOP (Xojo) vs procedural (PB) – this mainly comes up for me in thinking about how you build the equivalent of a window class to have multiple instances
- PB’s UI “gadgets” are generally simpler with many fewer customization attributes and events
– I particularly miss the ListBox with ability to render your own cells
– You can, of course, roll your own on a Canvas, just as in Xojo, and there are open source and 3rd party gadgets - No cross-compilation in PB
- But it does build small, single-file executables on each platform
- PB has two gadgets for WebViews, with neither being complete, IMHO. Xojo’s single HTML control has everything you need in one place (at the expense of a pretty large add-on)
- Xojo’s IDE is generally better
- PB has had a very stable API for literally decades – no API2!
- No equivalent to XojoScript built in, though it is pretty straightforward to embed something like Lua if you need that
- PB’s integrated 3D is far more extensive
- PB’s ability to use external libraries feels more powerful
Generally, PB feels like a lower-level language, so better for building cross-platform, foundational frameworks or performance-oriented tools where UI customization is less of an issue, while Xojo is higher-level and will get you to a more customizable UI and end-user app more quickly.
Yes, arguably if cross-platform is not your objective, neither of PB nor Xojo is your best option because X-plat tools always have to either work to the lowest-common denominator, or break X-plat with platform-specific functionality. In this respect, I would say PB is even more lowest-common denominator than Xojo, though I would also say it is more Windows-centric than MacOS-centric.
If you want platform-specific, “blessed” tooling, your free choices are Swift (MacOS), C#/.NET (Windows), and C/GTK(Linux). Notably though, both C#/.NET and GTK have credible X-plat options if you want to expand, whereas Swift currently does not.
the goal is ios + android, first - as in, both. web would be interesting, but it’s not priority 1. there is some desktop need, especially for windoze.
i don’t really care about the differences beween oo and functional. i live in both worlds. our erp is written in eloquence, which is old-school. the newer stuff is a combination of event-driven and oo.
layouts have always been the most difficult/time-consuming/prone-to-revisions-years-later part of any project i’ve built. BUT i’m not so married to having a prototyping tool that i’m giving it extra weight.
flutter has been an interesting journey. i’m not really a fan of it, though. i have also not been a fan of the js frameworks, to date.
Swift’s greatest weakness is that it is only Mac-specific. If you have a Mac and only develop for Mac, then Swift is a very good choice.
Otherwise, if I had to choose between Xojo and PureBasic, I would choose PureBasic. Its learning curve is fine, and it is very stable.
Swift is APPLE specific (not just mac, it does iPhone, iPad and even AppleTV), and there are limited releases for Windows I hear
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I apologize for my mistake.
Do you have any idea if Swift will come to Windows too? I mean developing on Windows like on Mac?
Thank you for your advice.
Honestly do not know… my understanding is the biggest thing missing is handling the GUI components of Windows, and an IDE … Windows isn’t an interest of mine so I don’t follow it too closely
Purebasic is great for small utilities or straightforward applications that don’t require big fancy GUI’s. It does not directly support mobile apps but through Spiderbasic you may be able to. I have no experience with that so I can’t say for sure.
Best way to describe Purebasic is that its a high level version of C.
I love how its so lightweight and fast
FYI - if you really interested in PB, you should buy a license now as they are changing to s subscription module soon.
Thank you.
you can use Swift on other platforms
There just arent UI bindings for it so trying to make a Windows desktop app with Swift doesnt work right now
As far as I know
This is my understanding too. For Windows and Linux it’s mainly console applications.
You can build Android apps with SwiftUI thanks to a 3rd party addition https://skip.tools/
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As I understand it, Swift outside Mac for UI development is clunky, at best. You can, of course, get native bindings to any UI library that presents a C interface… this would let you write Swift for Windows and WinUI 3 via WinRT, as here: Swift, meet WinRT Won’t run anywhere else, though. You could similarly get it to work with Android: Swift for Android, but again, separate code unless you roll your own abstraction layer.
Looks like there might be some ways to use Swift+GTK across all of the platforms. No idea if it would be as simple as recompiling; I doubt it.
I also doubt Apple will ever try to build a cross-platform abstraction layer like MAUI or try getting any of the core kits running on Windows, so I think there’s little chance of something like Xojo or MAUI with Swift as the language.
Not to hijack the thread, but say you were considering PureBasic wouldn’t you also consider B4X?
Kind regards, Andrew
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It doesn’t work natively on macOS, PureBasic does.
It’s essentially a layer on top of Java and uses JavaFX for your UI. As long as you’re happy with everything that entails, it’s a solid solution. Note there are separate versions for Desktop, Android, and IOS; the first two are free, but IOS is paid.
For me, that’s the biggest drawback. You can set it up so that you are running the IDE on Windows and debugging your program on MacOS. But until they come out with a Mac IDE, I will continue to use PB. It does make a strong choice for Windows users, however.
How does PureBasic compare to FutureBasic in terms of macOS development?
I haven’t used FB in a really long time (since the 1990s…), but just checked out the latest version. Since it is Mac-centric, it is strongly tied to the Mac’s native controls, so these will be much richer than PB offers directly (though, in theory, you can access all of the underlying Mac APIs from PB with declares, many of which you can find on the forum). It also appears to transpile to C and then compile, which is what PB does now, so I expect similar performance. You can also include raw C code in both.
I didn’t see any support for threads, accessing shared/dynamic libraries, networking, 3D, JSON, XML or things like maps/dicts or lists, but maybe you bring these in through C?