BBC BASIC for Windows
« Alternative IDE - any takers? »
Welcome Guest. Please Login or Register. Apr 5th, 2018, 9:59pm
ATTENTION MEMBERS: Conforums will be closing it doors and discontinuing its service on April 15, 2018. Ad-Free has been deactivated. Outstanding Ad-Free credits will be reimbursed to respective payment methods.
If you require a dump of the post on your message board, please come to the support board and request it.
Topic: Alternative IDE - any takers? (Read 475 times)
rtr2 Guest
Alternative IDE - any takers?
« Thread started on: Jan 23rd, 2015, 4:05pm »
Those of you who use 'LB Booster' (LBB) as well as BB4W will be aware that its debugging capabilities are in several respects better. For example:
LBB has real breakpoints, which you set or clear by double-clicking in the margin of the editor; they display as a little square and scroll automatically with the program.
The equivalent to the List Variables facility allows you to click on a variable 'of interest', which will be highlighted and automatically scrolled to remain visible.
The current heap and stack usage is displayed, without having to run a separate utility.
The program being debugged runs in a separate process so cannot freeze or otherwise upset the IDE, however badly it crashes. Problems arising from incomplete 'cleanup' are largely eliminated.
The profiler is integrated, rather than being a separate utility.
The LBB IDE is itself written in BBC BASIC, of course, so is readily amenable to modification, and could quite easily be adapted to become an alternative BBC BASIC IDE with the above features. Just about the only thing that it doesn't do, which the current BB4W IDE does, is automatic 'live' indentation. I don't know how to achieve that with the native Windows editor that it uses.
I'm not particularly motivated to do this work myself; my priorities lie in maintaining and improving the LBB IDE. So the question is, would anybody be interested in taking on such a project? The code is pretty straightforward, it doesn't use sneaky techniques or rely on knowledge of the internal workings of BB4W. On the other hand it is quite large, about 200 Kbytes of BASIC source code.
If this is a project which you might like to get involved with, either individually or as a collaborative effort with others, post a reply.
Logged