Microsoft Has Now Open-Source Their BASIC Code From 1983

Adding to Microsoft's wild ride this week after announcing Linux GUI apps for WSL2 and in turn writing their own Wayland compositor, Direct3D sort of for WSL2/Linux, and other announcements out of BUILD 2020, the company has announced the open-sourcing of their original BASIC implementation.

Microsoft GW-BASIC is now open-source following their prior open-sourcing of older MS-DOS versions. This original Microsoft BASIC version being open-sourced is from 1983 and is simply being open-sourced for historical purposes.

This Microsoft BASIC interpreter is written in Assembly, to no surprise considering the ivntage of the software. But Microsoft did push this code through a translator in order to make use of newer x86 ISA capabilities. As such, the code being open-sourced is that derived from their original source code.

More details on this Microsoft BASIC open-sourcing via their dev blog while the code is on GW-BASIC via GitHub.