The Gambas Project: It's Like Visual Basic On Linux

Gambas is an open-source development environment based on a Basic interpreter and with support for object extensions. It's been compared to Visual Basic, but Gambas supports Linux and is GPLv2 software.

A developer behind Gambas is a Phoronix fan and recently pointed out his project that goes by the tag line "Gambas Almost Means BASIC!" The premise behind the project is to have a graphical development environment based on BASIC that's almost as eays to use as Microsoft's Visual Basic. However, Gambas isn't trying to achieve any Visual Basic re-implementation or compatibility: it's just comparing itself to VB in terms of ease of use, etc.

The developer behind Gambas was inspired by Visual Basic's ease-of-use, the development environment, and the low barrier of entry to getting involved with VB application development. Gambas is made up of its own compiler, interpreter, archiver, a GUI component, and the development environment. The Gambas development environment is self-hosted in Gambas.

The Gambas project has been in development for several years now by Benoît Minisini. New releases are often and the Gambas 3.5.1 release shipped just earlier this month with various new features. For Phoronix readers wanting to more about Gambas or trying to encourage new programmers to try a VB-like experience on Linux, check out the Gambas SourceForge project page.