FreeBASIC

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**FreeBASIC** <tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">Image:FreeBASICLogo.gif</td></tr><tr><th>Paradigm:</th><td>procedural</td></tr><tr><th>Latest release:</th><td>0.16 Beta / 2006-06-11</td></tr><tr><th>Typing discipline:</th><td>Static</td></tr><tr><th>Dialects:</th><td>BASIC</td></tr><tr><th>Influenced by:</th><td>QuickBASIC</td></tr><tr><th>License:</th><td>GNU General Public License</td></tr><tr><th>Website:</th><td>http://www.freebasic.net</td></tr>

FreeBASIC is a free software/open source (GPL), 32-bit, BASIC compiler. It is designed to be syntactically similar with QuickBASIC, while expanding on the language and capabilities such as pointers, unsigned data types, inline-assembly, variable initializers, a preprocessor, name spaces, methods in UDT's (TYPE's), and properties in UDT's.

It makes use of the GNU binutils programming tools as backends and can produce console, QuickBasic-compatible graphical and GUI executables, besides dynamic and static libraries. A GCC frontend is currently being developed, which will enable compilation for many more operating systems than currently supported. It compiles for DOS (32-bit code running on a 16-bit DOS using a DOS extender), the Xbox, Microsoft Windows and Linux, and is being ported to other platforms.

Currently, software libraries like GTK+, GSL, SDL, Allegro, Lua and OpenGL can be used directly (read: No wrappers, only function and structure prototypes), and more are being added on every new release. A complete set of the Windows API headers is also included.

The compiler, and its nearly 90,000 lines of code, was, and still is, compiled by itself (FreeBASIC is a self-hosting compiler). The first version of FreeBASIC was written in Visual Basic for DOS for that purpose.