There's little doubt that the main competitor to 'BBC BASIC for Windows' is Carl Gundel's 'Liberty Basic'. Superficially the two products have a lot in common:
* They are both 'Windows only'.
* Their IDEs have very similar interfaces and capabilities.
* Both provide direct access to the Windows API and other DLLs.
* Both are interpreters (neither compiles to native code), in particular this allows them to support an EVAL function.
* Both use a 'run-time engine' to execute a tokenised version of the user's BASIC program.
* Both allow BASIC programs either to be executed directly from the IDE, or to be converted to a self-contained executable.
I have even been described in one blog as "a sort of British Carl Gundel"!
However when one looks under the surface there are in fact major differences between the two BASICs. Perhaps the most important is their contrasting approaches to providing capabilities beyond those of 'standard' (i.e. traditional) BASICs. Such capabilities include support for Windows GUI components (menus, dialogue boxes and so on), sorting of data arrays, sprite commands etc.
Liberty Basic builds these capabilities into the language itself. It therefore needs significantly more keywords than, and is more complex than, BBC BASIC. By contrast 'BBC BASIC for Windows' is a 'lean and mean' language: the interpreter provides only the core set of BASIC language features. Support for capabilities such as those mentioned above is provided by means of libraries (surprisingly, Liberty Basic doesn't support code libraries at all).
In this respect you can say that BBC BASIC has a lot in common with the C language, which also relies greatly on libraries (there are other ways in which BBC BASIC has similarities to C, which I will touch on later).
Perhaps the most striking consequence of this fundamental difference between the BASICs is in the size of their 'compiled' executables. The 'BBC BASIC for Windows' run-time engine is tiny (less than 64 kBytes) and its standalone executables - consisting of a single EXE file - are often less than 100 kBytes in size. Liberty Basic's executables, on the other hand, are never smaller than about 2.7 Mbytes (uncompressed) and consist of around ten separate files.
Carl Gundel, perhaps not surprisingly, defends the Liberty Basic executables on the grounds that modern PCs have so much memory and so much disk space that even 3 Mbytes isn't "large". However, compact executables really can have significant benefits, even on such systems.
For a start a small interpreter will tend to run more quickly, because it makes more efficient use of the CPU's instruction cache. Indeed BB4W's interpreter is so small that it will fit in its entirety within the instruction cache of some modern processors (e.g. the 64K cache of the AMD Athlon 64). This contributes to the marked speed difference between BBC BASIC and Liberty Basic (using a Sieve of Eratosthenes benchmark 'BBC BASIC for Windows' took 1.1 seconds and Liberty Basic took 16.6 seconds: fifteen times slower!).
The other big advantage of compact executables is speed of download via an internet connection. BBC BASIC's small, single-file EXEs can be placed on a web site and, with a couple of clicks of the mouse, can be running on the user's PC within a fraction of a second. There's no need to download them (manually) to the PC, nor to decide where to store them; Windows does it all behind the scenes.
I mentioned earlier that BBC BASIC has other similarities to C. These include its ability to access memory directly, at an arbitrary address, and the incorporation of an 'inline' assembler. Of course these are 'advanced' features, and most users will neither need nor want to utilise them, but in the hands of an expert they make it possible for BBC BASIC for Windows to do things that Liberty Basic could never do on its own.
An example is accessing 'object-based' APIs such as Direct3D, COM automation (ActiveX) etc. BBC BASIC can manage this quite easily, but Liberty Basic needs to rely on external DLLs (typically written in C or Visual Basic) to achieve it. Even things as simple as accessing an API function exported by ordinal rather than name are beyond Liberty Basic's capabilities.
Although BBC BASIC for Windows is much faster than Liberty Basic, there can still be occasions when it is not fast enough. This is where the built-in assembler can be invaluable; programs can be fairly easily written in which the few time-critical parts are written in assembler and the rest in BASIC, a hybrid approach which is extremely powerful and flexible.
To be fair, there are a couple of respects in which BBC BASIC is less capable than Liberty Basic: these are the maximum sizes of integer and string variables. In common with most modern languages BBC BASIC uses 32-bit integers whereas Liberty Basic supports 'arbitrary precision' integer arithmetic. BBC BASIC's strings are limited to 65535 characters, whereas Liberty Basic's strings can be much longer. In those very rare circumstances when these are important there are workarounds for both issues in BBC BASIC.
In conclusion I am quite convinced that BBC BASIC for Windows is a better language than Liberty Basic. It creates smaller, faster executables. It allows you to do far more things without recourse to using an external DLL. BBC BASIC is a real enthusiasts' language; whatever you want to do it will rise to the challenge.
* They are both 'Windows only'.
* Their IDEs have very similar interfaces and capabilities.
* Both provide direct access to the Windows API and other DLLs.
* Both are interpreters (neither compiles to native code), in particular this allows them to support an EVAL function.
* Both use a 'run-time engine' to execute a tokenised version of the user's BASIC program.
* Both allow BASIC programs either to be executed directly from the IDE, or to be converted to a self-contained executable.
I have even been described in one blog as "a sort of British Carl Gundel"!
However when one looks under the surface there are in fact major differences between the two BASICs. Perhaps the most important is their contrasting approaches to providing capabilities beyond those of 'standard' (i.e. traditional) BASICs. Such capabilities include support for Windows GUI components (menus, dialogue boxes and so on), sorting of data arrays, sprite commands etc.
Liberty Basic builds these capabilities into the language itself. It therefore needs significantly more keywords than, and is more complex than, BBC BASIC. By contrast 'BBC BASIC for Windows' is a 'lean and mean' language: the interpreter provides only the core set of BASIC language features. Support for capabilities such as those mentioned above is provided by means of libraries (surprisingly, Liberty Basic doesn't support code libraries at all).
In this respect you can say that BBC BASIC has a lot in common with the C language, which also relies greatly on libraries (there are other ways in which BBC BASIC has similarities to C, which I will touch on later).
Perhaps the most striking consequence of this fundamental difference between the BASICs is in the size of their 'compiled' executables. The 'BBC BASIC for Windows' run-time engine is tiny (less than 64 kBytes) and its standalone executables - consisting of a single EXE file - are often less than 100 kBytes in size. Liberty Basic's executables, on the other hand, are never smaller than about 2.7 Mbytes (uncompressed) and consist of around ten separate files.
Carl Gundel, perhaps not surprisingly, defends the Liberty Basic executables on the grounds that modern PCs have so much memory and so much disk space that even 3 Mbytes isn't "large". However, compact executables really can have significant benefits, even on such systems.
For a start a small interpreter will tend to run more quickly, because it makes more efficient use of the CPU's instruction cache. Indeed BB4W's interpreter is so small that it will fit in its entirety within the instruction cache of some modern processors (e.g. the 64K cache of the AMD Athlon 64). This contributes to the marked speed difference between BBC BASIC and Liberty Basic (using a Sieve of Eratosthenes benchmark 'BBC BASIC for Windows' took 1.1 seconds and Liberty Basic took 16.6 seconds: fifteen times slower!).
The other big advantage of compact executables is speed of download via an internet connection. BBC BASIC's small, single-file EXEs can be placed on a web site and, with a couple of clicks of the mouse, can be running on the user's PC within a fraction of a second. There's no need to download them (manually) to the PC, nor to decide where to store them; Windows does it all behind the scenes.
I mentioned earlier that BBC BASIC has other similarities to C. These include its ability to access memory directly, at an arbitrary address, and the incorporation of an 'inline' assembler. Of course these are 'advanced' features, and most users will neither need nor want to utilise them, but in the hands of an expert they make it possible for BBC BASIC for Windows to do things that Liberty Basic could never do on its own.
An example is accessing 'object-based' APIs such as Direct3D, COM automation (ActiveX) etc. BBC BASIC can manage this quite easily, but Liberty Basic needs to rely on external DLLs (typically written in C or Visual Basic) to achieve it. Even things as simple as accessing an API function exported by ordinal rather than name are beyond Liberty Basic's capabilities.
Although BBC BASIC for Windows is much faster than Liberty Basic, there can still be occasions when it is not fast enough. This is where the built-in assembler can be invaluable; programs can be fairly easily written in which the few time-critical parts are written in assembler and the rest in BASIC, a hybrid approach which is extremely powerful and flexible.
To be fair, there are a couple of respects in which BBC BASIC is less capable than Liberty Basic: these are the maximum sizes of integer and string variables. In common with most modern languages BBC BASIC uses 32-bit integers whereas Liberty Basic supports 'arbitrary precision' integer arithmetic. BBC BASIC's strings are limited to 65535 characters, whereas Liberty Basic's strings can be much longer. In those very rare circumstances when these are important there are workarounds for both issues in BBC BASIC.
In conclusion I am quite convinced that BBC BASIC for Windows is a better language than Liberty Basic. It creates smaller, faster executables. It allows you to do far more things without recourse to using an external DLL. BBC BASIC is a real enthusiasts' language; whatever you want to do it will rise to the challenge.
posted by Richard Russell | 9:56 AM
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