Show HN: PowerBasilisk: Open x64 PowerBASIC in Rust generates LLVM (opens in new tab)

In my last post about Wall Street Raider, I was asked a lot about why I hadn't tried to use AI to port the game to another programming language. The truth is that the original creator, Michael Jenkins, is still helping with the project and he only knows and has worked with PowerBasic for the past 40 years. So it didn't make sense to change the language.

But I was running into issues with my PB-C++-ElectronJS architecture where my FFI event system was causing race conditions and freezing the game, especially with navigation. I also always had dreams of Wall Street Raider on 64-bit cross-platform, but I always thought this would be a challenge... until I learned Claude Code and proper AI orchestration strategies.

You see, in 2012 the creator of PowerBasic Bob Zale passed away and his wife maintained it until selling it to Drake Software in 2017. Drake promised 64-bit and new features. Instead, they sold to Cinven, who shut down the forums and the website, abandoning the loyal developers who still had to maintain legacy systems now with no place to ask for help or look up example code.

Well I read this article recently about how they made a C compiler from scratch using Claude Code and I thought that was cool and I said I want to do that with Powerbasic. But one thing that you need of course is test harness, which of course there was none for PowerBasic. So I orchestrated Claude to build the compiler and also an interpreter to create TDD feedback loop. CC ran for many hours using my many long-winded markdown files as a north star, and eventually came up with a compiler... that didn't work right.

But now I was able to set up a test harness for Wall Street Raider. You see, the PBWin.exe PowerBasic compiler program has no CLI capabilities. Every time you compile it will pop up a Win32 message box. It is supposed to have a quiet switch, but it don't work. So that is why I had to make my own compiler. Now with my compiler and interpreter in hand, I was able to allow Claude to iterate on the compiler itself and Wall Street Raider code, fixing bugs in both codebases at same time. It ran for many hours and eventually smoke tested and fixed the compiler issues, and I was able to write Discord bot to download threads from the bug-reports channel and sic Claude on them, enforcing strict unit/integration/e2e Selenium testing practices in my many CLAUDE.md files scattered throughout project.

If you would like to check out my other stuff you may visit http://benjaminward.com/ thank you for reading.