Gambas

Gambas

System(s): GNU/Linux, Unix-like, Cygwin

Type(s): Software development

Engine(s): Internal runtime

Designer(s): Benoît Minisini

Coder(s): Benoît Minisini, contributors

Version: 3.x

First Release: 1999

Latest Release: On-going

Code Base: Self-hosted

Framework(s): Qt

License(s): GNU General Public License 2

In software development, Gambas is an object-oriented dialect and runtime of the BASIC programming language, along with an integrated development environment to accompany it, which runs on GNU/Linux and other Unix-like computer operating systems.

It is intended to provide a similar experience for developing BASIC programs to Visual Basic, with a similar emphasis on rapid application development. Users of other BASIC dialects should still not feel too out place using it however, and it is explicitly not a clone of VB (indeed, its object model takes heavy inspiration from Java). Gambas is intended to be an alternative for former Visual Basic developers who have decided to migrate to GNU/Linux, and has become popular for porting over or writing internal business applications similar to how Visual Basic grew in the 1990s, and Visual Basic .NET is used today.

'Gambas' is a recursive acronym for "Gambas Almost Means BASic", while "Gambas" is also the word for prawns in the Spanish language, from which the project's logos and mascots are derived - one for each major version.

Developed in Paris, France by Benoît Minisini since 1999, Gambas is free software, released under the GNU General Public License. The current version as of October 2022 is version 3.17.2, part of the third major iteration of the program.

Piga Software has used Gambas since April 2007, partly due their previous experience with Visual Basic 6 - their original development tool pre-2005 - as well as QBasic. They have grown to particularly like the language, citing that it has all the ease of development offered by BASIC without many of the problems in Visual Basic, particularly noting its advanced and well-designed IDE.

They also enjoy its massive and easy support for various middleware offered by its component structure, such as Qt, GTK, ncurses, OpenGL, OpenAL and SDL, as well as its ability to simply utilize various installation methods such as GNU Autotools, slackpkg, pacman, RPM, and debs (the latter two tailored for specific distributions). In addition, Piga Software sees the advantages in investing its time and interest in a somewhat novelty language, and hopes to see Gambas grow into a popular language sub-culture similar as to how QBasic grew in the late 1990s and early 2000s.