Replacement for Xojo as it relates to windows development

I should add, there is another language that I dabbled in which is dolphin smalltalk. The good news, the language is now open source, the downside its a very small community.

https://www.object-arts.com/dolphin7.html

I have not touched Smalltalk in nearly 20 years

It was odd even then
One of the guys one our team thought it would be fun to screw with our installs and tinkered with them and changed how the + operator worked for integers (which you can do)
Imagine our surprise when + started acting like - and … yeah … careful with that stuff :stuck_out_tongue:

I think that statement best express what I feel. Its almost like, at what point of the Xojo train express did you hop on and how long did that ride last before you felt your seat was swapped with an airline super extreme economy seat.

The good news for me, My current Xojo License and third party license and comfort with the language will suite my main development needs for many years to come. For the work that I do, requiring the upgrade is not a requirement unless the platform I am developing for introduce changes where I need the language to adapt to. In the case of Web 2.0, its going to be a year out or so before I decide that Web 2.0 is mature enough for me to switch my web app projects to unless the browsers that are supported for 2019 r3.1 suddenly have an issue where I am force to upgrade the language platform.

It has been since 2004 or 2005 since I last touched Dolphin; however, from what I remember it was very heavily focused on OOP. Think back then, I had a hard time understanding the concepts of OOP (I didnt have any one to help explain). It wasn’t until I got to Xojo that OOP concepts started to sink in.

actually I should have said its been nearly 30 years - not 20 - since I touched smalltalk

Yeah in Smalltalk EVERYTHING is objects
Numbers, Classes, Functions you name it its an object of some kind and you can do all kinds of interesting things
It is a very different way to work - even from Xojo - as you can override the behaviour of anything

After months of looking for alternatives I finally decided that there are none that fit what I want better than Xojo. I just pulled the trigger and upgraded to Pro today.

congrats on the purchase! Thinking about it now, you will have access to a full version of 2019 r3.1 to deal with any backwards compatibility projects that may have issues in future versions in the event that a re-write would be needed in future versions.

As for me, my license expires in aug, in which I might wait until 2021 before thinking of getting a newer license.

And THIS is exactly the problem Xojo has culitvated

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My last Pro license expired back in 2014, I first got a RealStudio license back in 2008. I spent some years doing something else and just got back into programming some months ago. I had a Web license only until today.

I feel I made the right choice, after months of looking for something else I did not find it.

The Runtime costs (at the time) were really not an issue as it was such a productive environment.

The ability to test a window without waiting for a compiler and the ability to edit code while your are debugging (as well as having a decent debugger) saves so much time compared to the very slow (in comparison) Xojo environment.

The only reason we switched to Realbasic was because we started building different types of applications that weren’t suitable for Omnis.

The remainder of our licenses expired last year.

We didn’t renew any of them because the ever decreasing drop in IDE performance finally reached a point with 2019r2 where it was too slow to use (the v2 API omnishambles also didn’t fill us with a warm fuzzy feeling).
Unfortunately, it appears that Xojo don’t care about performance (or stability) so it might be a long time before we renew.

4D is also drag/drop IDE and cross-platform.

Personally, I feel I am gradually being frozen out of 4D because of cost. Their model is not very friendly to the personal/hobby developer. The lowest level gets you interpreted only and cost $390. While interpreted, this is in fact very fast. There are many powerful commands in the language for doing sorting and querying and such and all these are very fast and written in some low level language. I have no problem with this. For my personal use, it is fine. I own a version that is compatible with Catalina and it will be fine for years without my needing to upgrade to the latest version.
But I cannot create an app that I can give to someone. You need the complied version for that and that puts you into a price tier that I cannot handle ($1500).
But if you make money programming or work for a business that makes money it is a great product.
It is not for someone who thinks that Xojo charges too much for their product. :slight_smile:
Add their pricing and product range is extensive. It is hard from their website alone to really figure out what you need and what it gets you. Ultimately you would have to talk to someone.

Dolphin is dead. Welcome to Pharo. http://www.pharo.org/

It’s great, but it will lag behind Dart/Flutter soon (they made starting inverse choices, Pharo started in Desktop and will need to expand to Mobile at some point, and Flutter started in Mobile and is expanding to Desktop right now very fast). The Pharo “Flutter” is called Bloc, and have less ambitious future possibilities, also Pharo, for example, Dart compiles to native code. Both, right now, need UI designs made by code, but Flutter already have (free) community helper tools to write most of it for you using WYSIWYG drag and drop.

I love both from a CS researcher point of view, but won’t use both for commercial products RIGHT NOW, and won’t do it using Pharo any time, besides loving it as a language to play with.

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To be fair, Xojo requires a Mac Computer to build a Mac OS app from code from a Windows computer:
Compile for Mac OS from Windows?

And iOS also, right?

Until today, PureBasic is a “compile where it will run” language.

Yes, you are correct.

This reminds me of LiveCode where flipping the switch would change from designing to testing the app without compiling. Few aspects of it drove me nuts with this behavior and hypercard was never really my thing.