can a visual basic program be platform independent?

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digitman
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can a visual basic program be platform independent?

Post by digitman »

Hi.

I'm about to write a program in Visual Basic 6.0. I want the program to be
multiplatform. After I've finished coding it, I want it to run at Linux and Macintosh as well as Windows. Can this be acheived through WXWindows?

If not, what other options do I have?
Regards.
metalogic
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Post by metalogic »

Hi digitman,
The short answer is: no :(

VB is pretty much the farthest you'll ever get from platform independence I think. If you like the higher level syntax, I would suggest you give Delphi a try. It's as friendly as VB and almost as powerful as C++. They have a Linux compiler called Kylix. No Mac though.

For Windows/Linux/Mac you are looking mainly at C++ or Java. There are some others as well: Python is one of the ones that wxWidgets has a binding to.

I believe you are misunderstanding what wxWidgets is. wxWidgets is a portable library that allows you to write C++ (and other bindings) programs against a consistent API on different operating systems. It's not a compatibility layer (http://www.winehq.org) or virtual machine (http://www.java.com) that allows you run a program unmodified on other OSs.

I guess you could try to run your VB program on Wine but that will still leave you without Mac support (I think).

- Santiago
Last edited by metalogic on Tue Nov 23, 2004 7:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
gururamnath
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Re: can a visual basic program be platform independent?

Post by gururamnath »

digitman wrote: If not, what other options do I have?
You can try wxBasic - http://wxbasic.sourceforge.net. But it is not actively developed. The current version uses only wx 2.3.2. If you have experience with .NET and you want to use only Basic, you can try the wx .NET binding http://wxnet.sourceforge.net/ along with VB.NET.

-Guru Kathiresan
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