Hubbry Logo
search
logo
Gambas
Gambas
current hub
2246277

Gambas

logo
Community Hub0 Subscribers
Write something...
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
See all
Gambas

Gambas is an object-oriented dialect of the BASIC programming language, and an integrated development environment that accompanies it. Designed to run on Linux and other Unix-like computer operating systems, its name is a recursive acronym for Gambas Almost Means BASIC. Gambas is also the word for prawns in the Spanish, French, and Portuguese languages, from which the project's logos are derived.

Gambas was developed by the French programmer Benoît Minisini, with its first release coming in 1999. Benoît had grown up with the BASIC language, and decided to make a free software development environment that could quickly and easily make programs with user interfaces.

The Gambas 1.x versions were first released on January 4, 2005, and featured an interface made up of several different separate windows for forms and IDE dialogues in a similar fashion to the interface of earlier versions of the GIMP. It could also only develop applications using Qt and was more oriented towards the development of applications for KDE. The last release of the 1.x versions was Gambas 1.0.19.

The first of the 2.x versions was released on January 2, 2008, after three to four years of development. It featured a major redesign of the interface, now with all forms and functions embedded in a single window, as well as some changes to the Gambas syntax, although for the most part code compatibility was kept. It featured major updates to existing Gambas components as well as the addition of some new ones, such as new components that could use GTK+ or SDL for drawing or utilize OpenGL acceleration. Gambas 2.x versions can load up and run Gambas 1.x projects, with occasional incompatibilities; the same is true for Gambas 2.x to 3.x, but not from Gambas 1.x to 3.x.

The next major iteration of Gambas, the 3.x versions, was released on December 31, 2011. A 2015 benchmark published on the Gambas website showed Gambas 3.8.90 scripting as being faster to varying degrees than Perl 5.20.2 and the then-latest 2.7.10 version of Python in many tests. Version 3.16.0 released on April 20, 2021, featured full support for Wayland using the graphical components, as well as parity between the Qt 5 and GTK 3 components.

Gambas is designed to build graphical programs using the Qt (currently Qt 4.x or 5.x since 3.8.0) or the GTK toolkit (GTK 3.x also supported as of 3.6.0); the Gambas IDE is written in Gambas. Gambas includes a GUI designer to aid in creating user interfaces in an event-driven style, but can also make command line applications, as well as text-based user interfaces using the ncurses toolkit. The Gambas runtime environment is needed to run executables.

Functionality is provided by a variety of components, each of which can be selected to provide additional features. Drawing can be provided either through Qt and GTK toolkits, with an additional component which is designed to switch between them. Drawing can also be provided through the Simple DirectMedia Layer (originally version 1.x, with 2.x added as of 3.7.0), which can also be utilized for audio playback through a separate sound component (a component for the OpenAL specification has also been added). GPU acceleration support is available through an OpenGL component, as well as other hardware functionally provided by various other components. There are also components for handling other specialized tasks.

With Gambas, developers can also use databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, build KDE (Qt) and GNOME GTK applications with DCOP, translate Visual Basic programs to Gambas and run them under Linux, build network solutions, and create CGI web applications. The IDE also includes a tool for the creation of installation packages, supporting GNU Autotools, slackpkg, pacman, RPM, and debs (the latter two then tailored for specific distributions such as Fedora/RHEL/CentOS, Mageia, Mandriva, OpenSUSE and Debian, Ubuntu/Mint). Support for AppImage building was mainlined with version 3.19.0.

See all
User Avatar
No comments yet.