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0 pointswvenable5y ago0 comments

Dirty secret: There is plenty of multi-million dollar VB 6.0 software still running out there in the world.

I think it's not even possible to compile it without a Windows XP VM but the output still runs on Windows 10.

Microsoft honestly should have provided a compatible version of Visual Basic that would run in the .NET environment instead of VB.NET. That would have allowed much more software to move over than what actually happened.

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4 comments · 3 top-level

saurik5y ago· 1 in thread

I dont know if you are being carefully specific about "compiling" as opposed to generally using the tooling (and maybe using P-code), but you can run Visual Basic 6 on newer versions of Windows. I have a machine with it set up, actually, as a researcher friend of mine inherited such a codebase. Here is an example set of instructions, not that I have read or vetted them (I don't remember what guide I had read to set it up).

https://itman.in/en/how-to-install-visualbasic-6-ide-on-wind...

alternatetwo5y ago

I can run Visual Studio 6 just fine on Windows 10 - the only thing I needed to do was not install certain features and disable the old Java version install/check, and that's it. Windows is insane regarding backwards compatibility.

flomo5y ago

Microsoft's OS division has essentially committed to supporting VB6 apps forever. I imagine that RedHat and etc will do that with Python 2, too much of the world is running on it.

(VisualBasic, like Python was the most popular programming language of its day and found its way into a lot of niches which are not developer-centric.)

cable26005y ago

So it is like COBOL on a Mainframe? Too costly to convert into a Microcomputer modern language but cheap enough to run in COBOL.

I had no idea that VB 6.0 has so much support for it.

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