How good is FreeBasic?

[Gamer2007]

I am just wondering and also what is the pc spec required to run Freebasic...

thank you. 

[Clyde]

You can run Freebasic on pretty much any system, Dos / Windows / Linux / ( Mac - I think ) and spec isn't really an issue.
And in my opinion its a fantastic language, much faster per pixel rendering and also allows for many external libraries to be used. And the added bonus is, it's free to download and use. And it's far less complicated then BMAX is, i've found.

To find out more, as im pretty much still learning stuff, try www.freebasic.net/forum.( there's also a site address that links to SourceForge but I don't know it off hand) Check out the News section at the top of their forum and you'll find links to stable releases as well as testing versions.

Also you may want to check out the really cool IDE, called FBIDE which is all found at the same address. Which makes things a little easier, if you're not too fond on the dos prompt.

Cheers and hope it's of some use to you dude,
Clyde.

[Shockwave]

The best thing about it is that it's free

[Shockwave]

Was thinking about this and then I realised that I had written the perfect program to demostrate the poswer of FB.

Here's a realtime mandlebrot (animated), there is no pre-calc, all calculations are floating point!
It's still fast.

[Clyde]

Neat example mate.

[Shockwave]

Thanks Clyde, I should tip my hat to Jim, the first brot I did was in Blitz after looking at a mandlebrot program by him in Yabasic. This is just a conversion of my Blitz Brot.

[relsoft]

Yay!!! Nice!!!

[Shockwave]

Lol, well it aint as nice as your animated Julia rings but it's something Thanks Rel.

[TinDragon]

Freebasic is a very good product for a free compiler setup. The language may not currently have some of the features like OOP and have a more traditional basic dialect than say Blitzmax or Darkbasic, but it works and has some nice features like user definable type's. It also has alot of libs with it that give alot of choice and freedom in how you code. There are libs for DX,OGL and others and it's well worth downloading and giving a try even if you already code in something else.

[Clyde]

btw OOP ( object orientated programming ) is apparently destined for freeBASIC.