X11-BASIC

[christos]

I'm placing this in the GFA BASIC section because the language is actually inspired from it. A while back there was a discussion with the author about backporting X11-BASIC to the ST. Apparently since August this has happened.

I didn't have time to test but from what I read it needs the VT52 emulator running. Not sure if it will work with another emulator but it would be cool to find out. Anyway if someone is willing to test you can download it from the X11-BASIC website.

X11 BASIC is available for Linux, Windows an assortment of other OSes and Android. So it's now possible to do Android development with an Atari! It should be fun!

[lp]

I messed around with it. Toswin2 seems to work. I tried the demo.bas and it was terribly slow interpreted. At first I was not even sure it was running it was so slow and this was on aranym.

[tenox]

Wow this is fantastic. I've tried X11-Basic years ago but it looked little bit abandoned. But looking at the version history looks like a well maintained project. I will have to look in to it some more!

[lp]

Ok, so the pure ASCII interpreter is slow as heck, so I wanted to try the byte-code virtual machine. It's suppose to be ~10 times faster.

The byte-code compiler seems to work:

Code: Select all

*************************************************************
*           X11-Basic bytecode compiler                     *
*                    by Markus Hoffmann 1997-2014 (c)       *
* V.1.23/1234 date:                       2014-07-02        *
*************************************************************

<-- demo.bas
MERGE: programbuffer=0x1be428c len=15725
Buffer at 0x1bf23cc
Compile ...
548     lines.
5       procedures.
1       labels.
45      variables.
 labels.... variables ...37     relocations.
--> b.b [Info:
  Size of   Text-Segment: 4152
  Size of roData-Segment: 1460
  Size of   Data-Segment: 0
  Size of    bss-Segment: 368
  Size of String-Segment: 248
  Size of Symbol-Segment: 1296 (108 symbols)
] done.
done.


Then I get this from the byte-code virtual machine (verbose mode):

Code: Select all

b.b loaded (7196 Bytes)
Bytecode header found (V.3412)
WARNING: This Bytecode was compiled for a different version ofX11-Basic.
 ERROR.
xbvm: could not run b.b.


It appears to suffer from some sort of Endianness issues as the version is stored in a word, but the bytes are swapped?
3412 <-> 1234 ??

Anyone else get the same results?