TwinBasic

[fafalone]

1) Yes, it has been lifted, along with most other similar limits.

2) There's a lot of bugs with running, especially when running them in 64bit VBA, and Property Pages aren't supported for in-project UCs (.tbcontrol, same as .ctl, as opposed to ocx)

3) The Printer object is completely unimplemented at this point, but it's an announced feature for v1, so can be expected very likely before the end of the year. If you want to print, you'll need a solution such as BSPrinter (has been tested to work in tB according to their page), or doing it manually through Windows APIs/COM interfaces.

4) Collection performance blows VB6 out of the water on most operations, some being thousands of times faster, and matches it on the rest. And this is without compiler optimization (early tests of that show it beating VB6, but it can't optimization code with classes/objects yet)

5) Lines of code themselves aren't a limitation... my ucShellBrowse control works perfectly, for instance, and that's 50k lines with a dependency on tbShellLib, my oleexp replacement that's also covering large swathes of the Windows API base, clocking in at 167k lines, nearly every one going into the global namespace. But larger projects do raise the odds something in it will be unimplemented or hit a bug (of which there are still quite a few, being in beta and all).

Check out these Collection benchmarks Wayne posted in the Discord channel:


removal all items via index position (backwards, sequential), 60000 items. 2607ms 1ms
removal all items via index position (random), 60000 items. 2270ms 43ms

(the last two couldn't fit on my screen for the screenshot)

[Schmidt]

There's something wrong with the VB6.Col For Each test...
...which traditionally works pretty fast (as the test below shows, when enumerating 1Mio entries)

Private Sub Form_Click()
  Cls
  Dim i As Long, Col As New Collection, T, V
  
  T = Timer: i = 0
    For i = 1 To 10 ^ 6
      Col.Add i
    Next
  Print "Col Add:", CLng((Timer - T) * 1000) & "msec"
  
  T = Timer: i = 0
    For Each V In Col
      i = i + 1: If i <> V Then Stop
    Next
  Print "For Each:", CLng((Timer - T) * 1000) & "msec"
End Sub

Olaf

[Erwin69]

1) Yes, it has been lifted, along with most other similar limits.

2) There's a lot of bugs with running, especially when running them in 64bit VBA, and Property Pages aren't supported for in-project UCs (.tbcontrol, same as .ctl, as opposed to ocx)

3) The Printer object is completely unimplemented at this point, but it's an announced feature for v1, so can be expected very likely before the end of the year. If you want to print, you'll need a solution such as BSPrinter (has been tested to work in tB according to their page), or doing it manually through Windows APIs/COM interfaces.

4) Collection performance blows VB6 out of the water on most operations, some being thousands of times faster, and matches it on the rest. And this is without compiler optimization (early tests of that show it beating VB6, but it can't optimization code with classes/objects yet)

5) Lines of code themselves aren't a limitation... my ucShellBrowse control works perfectly, for instance, and that's 50k lines with a dependency on tbShellLib, my oleexp replacement that's also covering large swathes of the Windows API base, clocking in at 167k lines, nearly every one going into the global namespace. But larger projects do raise the odds something in it will be unimplemented or hit a bug (of which there are still quite a few, being in beta and all).

Check out these Collection benchmarks Wayne posted in the Discord channel:


removal all items via index position (backwards, sequential), 60000 items. 2607ms 1ms
removal all items via index position (random), 60000 items. 2270ms 43ms

(the last two couldn't fit on my screen for the screenshot)

Thanks for the info fafalone, really helpful! I'm getting more and more anxious to try this, and your answers on points 1 and 2 are a great help for some design decisions I have to take now.

[WaynePhillipsEA]

There's something wrong with the VB6.Col For Each test...
...which traditionally works pretty fast (as the test below shows, when enumerating 1Mio entries)

Private Sub Form_Click()
  Cls
  Dim i As Long, Col As New Collection, T, V
  
  T = Timer: i = 0
    For i = 1 To 10 ^ 6
      Col.Add i
    Next
  Print "Col Add:", CLng((Timer - T) * 1000) & "msec"
  
  T = Timer: i = 0
    For Each V In Col
      i = i + 1: If i <> V Then Stop
    Next
  Print "For Each:", CLng((Timer - T) * 1000) & "msec"
End Sub

Olaf

Well spotted. Indeed, there was a copy-paste bug in the for-each test causing the results to also be affected by the cost of forward-index retrieval. After fixing the bug, the VB6 and tB versions of that test now look to perform similarly.

[fafalone]

Thanks for the info fafalone, really helpful! I'm getting more and more anxious to try this, and your answers on points 1 and 2 are a great help for some design decisions I have to take now.

For number 2, Property Pages for UCs are also planned for V1 so aren't too far off, and I'm sure much work will go into fixing all the major bugs before then too.

[Erwin69]

For number 2, Property Pages for UCs are also planned for V1 so aren't too far off, and I'm sure much work will go into fixing all the major bugs before then too.

Well, I'm still some way off that 256 controls limit, but to avoid potential problems going forward, I was considering a redesign of part of the UI by combining a number of controls (treeview, listview, label, combo, splitter bar, frame, picturebox) into a UC, which then could be repeated a number of times. (Think of the app having several tabs with a similar view on each tab, but covering different topics.) But if I can avoid spending time on that, I have more time for other things that increase functionality.

[VB6 Programming]

twinBASIC status update:

twinBASIC Update: September 10, 2023

Highlights include a global search IDE addin sample, addin extensibility access to the filesystem, and a discussion about inheritance in twinBASIC.

nolongerset.com/twinbasic-update-september-10-2023

[yereverluvinuncleber]

Well, I'm still some way off that 256 controls limit

I hit that limit regularly. Creating controls arrays of all the labels normally gives me sufficient space but it is another good reason to migrate to TB.

[xiaoyao]

The twinBASIC Family Tree

VB6 and twinBASIC are "twins". You know, just like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito are twins.

https://nolongerset.com/the-twinbasic-family-tree/

This is an interesting picture, where BASIC was everything at Microsoft, and now almost everything doesn't exist, one by one being abandoned.
BASIC FOR DOS
qbasic
vb6
vba
vb.net
ACCESS VB
asp

[VB6 Programming]

Find details of the latest twinBASIC releases at...

twinBASIC-programming-Beta-releases

[VB6 Programming]

twinBASIC status update:

twinBASIC Update: September 17, 2023

Highlights include inline editor widget support for tB IDE addins, a sample TODO addin, keyboard shortcut registration, and a preview of a UserControl Builder addin.

nolongerset.com/twinbasic-update-september-17-2023