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Show HN: LunarBasic, a BASIC that compiles 2D games to native executables (lunarbasic.com)
6 points by essial 20 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
I built LunarBasic because I wanted a modern recreation of BlitzBasic from back in the day. I wanted it to have good step debugging features, and I wanted it to compile down to a native binary with no external dependencies. I do know there's an open source BlitzBasic out there but I wanted something simpler and more concise. It does have a "pro" feature set, but for the foreseeable future, anyone joining up will have the pro version in perpetuity (eg I'm not trying to sell anything here).

It's early (v0.8.0). Would love feedback on the language design and compiler output, especially from anyone who's used QB64, Blitz, or FreeBASIC.

Currently runs on x64/arm64 Windows, arm64 macOS, and arm64 Linux (x64 linux coming soon once I get the toolchain together).



Seems neat, but I think asking your average HN’er to run a compiled binary from an effectively unknown source is going to be a hard sell.

I might try it out later if I can find some time to spin up a Linux VM.

I also find it rather amusing that there are two high-level BASIC variants both targeting gaming, and both with astronomy-related names. MoonBasic seems to have gained a bit more traction likely because it’s open source.

MoonBASIC Show HN Post from a month ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48910579


Didn't even know MoonBasic was a thing, that's funny! And yeah I understand on the 'run random binary' thing. The best I can do is run it against VirusTotal, which I've now done. That's fine though, there's nothing new under the sun (pun not intended!). I'll continue to iterate and improve and try to make it the best in its domain. I'm using it myself for my own games as well (the original reason for creating it).

For the site URL: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url-analysis/u-043c8bb6b294a9...

And after download/unzipping and running it against the setup exe itself: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file-analysis/NzcxMzNlM2VkMDI...

The only mark that comes up is "Suspicious.low.ml.score" in Trapmine. Given it's telling me absolutely nothing about what that even means, and given the name of the 'hit' seemingly to say it's some low confidence machine learning hit, not sure what to do about that. VirusTotal Jujubox also shows clean (as expected) - the rest should complete soon.

Also I checked out MoonBasic, it's a cool project but it looks like it has a very different target/goal than I do as far as language/syntax and game types go - so while there is some minor overlap, I think we are operating in two fundamentally different spaces.

(edit) Update: It finished running through the sandbox. I see some warnings that seem related to the fact the IDE is an AOT compiled .net binary. If anyone thinks anything on that list looks incorrect let me know and I'll try to figure out what to do about it.

Update2: From what I can tell, the scarier 'hits' are simply because I'm not signing the windows installer. I've looked into signing installers but best I can see for windows is over a thousand bucks. If anyone knows of a cheaper alternative I'm all ears.


Technical detail for anyone curious:

The compiler pipeline is Tokenizer -> Parser -> SemanticAnalyzer -> Binder -> CEmitter -> NativeExecutableBuilder.

It emits C and links against a bundled toolchain, so the output binary has no external runtime dependencies.




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