PowerBASIC alternatives - RealStudio 2012 R2

[Haakon Birkeland]

Just for the fun of it, I downloaded the RealStudio trial (144 MB) today â€" years after last time I tried it. As mentioned elsewhere I think it was called RealBasic back then.


The first thing I'd like to know about a development environment is more or less it's limitations and quirks. Does it feel comfy? Can it do stuff I know I definitely need or like to be able to pull of? How large are the executables â€" and so on. So, I'll at last explore some of these things for my own joy â€" and your's, if you care.


After installation of almost any application I explore the options/settings to make sure it suits my liking as far as it can. This one didn't seem to have all that much interesting to mess about with. Here is a few screenshots of the interface and the New Project dialogue. I'll follow up with a few posts of the options/settings.

[Haakon Birkeland]

Her are the four first dialogues from the options.

[Haakon Birkeland]

And another four.


The last one is the build settings, so unless there are some more things hidden somewhere I have yet to explore, there seem to be little control over the naming of the output files and folder â€" in the trial version at least.

[Haakon Birkeland]

I was asked initially for a folder to store the build files, and after that it just stays with the path (as shown in the options) where it adds a folder for the executable.


It's named "My Application.exe" and has a subfolder called "My Application Libs" containing three framework files. It expects them to be either there or in the same folder as the executable. I'd hate not being able to choose name for the application and it's dependencies, but it might be available elsewhere â€" perhaps together with the form/project icon setting. Haven't seen those nowhere yet â€" but then again I have hardly examined the UI yet.


All in all where talking 4.9 MB for a simple one form default application, where 2 of those are the executable itself. Not a pleasing start when we're talking about a PowerBASIC alternative ...

[Haakon Birkeland]

Now I was tempted to add every control available to the form, to see what kind of possibly insane increase in dependencies that adds up to. As the picture shows, the objects seem to be placed even outside the form when I iterated through the list and double-click added one of each control.


I wonder if it compiles without fuss now ...


â€" It did.


The executable grew almost a MB from the content, but only a total of 8 dependencies where in the build folder. That's less than I expected, and they only added up to 8.5 MB, giving a total of 11.3 MB for the lot in a runnable state.

[Haakon Birkeland]

There seem to be a fair load of sample projects to explore, although I have yet to go there.

[Haakon Birkeland]

Think I'm gonna call it quits for today quite soon. If anyone like me to check out some specifics cause you can't be bothered to download and install â€" let me know.


Here is a last batch of pictures, the application details from the project tab in the UI. Seems the Icon dialogue didn't offer to fetch a file â€" odd ...

[Haakon Birkeland]

OK â€" just one more ...


Did my version of Hello World, and it seems the basic in RealStudio don't concatenate strings with "&" (Syntax Error) but with "+".

Code Select Expand

frm_Main.Title = "Hello " + txt_FirstName.Text +  " " +  txt_LastName.Text


When accessing the code windows the application crashed and did so with "style" although that was less than useful. After restarting it asks to reopen the unsaved file(s), thus nothing was gone.


Executing the built application a few times resulted in a message box stating some of the trial limitations.

[Cho Sing Kum]

Here is the Youtube channel of RealSoftware themselves:

http://www.youtube.com/user/RealSoftwareVideo/videos?view=0

You can see some intro/demo there.

[Wilko Verweij]

I played around a bit with RealBASIC long ago. It was when I had decided to quit VB; RealBASIC made a special offer to VB-users at that time. My main issue was speed of calculations with non-integers. RealBASIc (at that time, might have changed) was even slower than VB. Powerbasic was much faster than VB so that determined my choice. In the beginning I used PB forms but later (sorry...) discovered FireFly.

[David Chisholm]

REALBasic is good if you want a nice GUI interface but it is very poor in terms of executable size and performance.  I took some VB5 code and ported it to RB.  It was a significant effort as the syntax is quite different.  My main disappointment,  however, was the performance.  In VB5 it took 55 seconds to run the application.  In RB it took 20 minutes!  In PowerBASIC it took 45 seconds.  The application did a lot of disk i/o and sorting.  Most of the issue was in disk i/o.  In the end I sucked the whole file into memory and processed it there which reduced the run time to 4 minutes.

I have found that RB's focus on improving their performance has shifted (they were looking at using LLVM for the back end and it was supposed be out over 2 years ago!) as they put all their effort into their web version of the product.

[Petrus Vorster]

 I dropped Realbasic for Powerbasic.
Too many issues with simple tools like Random files (not supported).
Syntax is very different. Nice GUI and it writes for Windows, Linux or Mac in one go but very slow.
Not a contender here!
Even Freebasic is better and faster than RB, I know, I had them all.

[Haakon Birkeland]

Spend a fair while yesterday looking at their videos and browsing their forum. I saw several discussions of "this versus that" regarding speed and a handful of complaints as well. As far as I recall, those threads seemed to be of some age.

Eventually it comes down to what one needs to get done. Some things it will probably suck at, and others it will do fine for. The power of having Linux/OS X within reach, for some types of applications, is an incentive though. But then again, how about if one want to leverage a library and it ain't available for all systems ...