twinBASIC Update: November 3, 2025

On April 23, 2021, I helped Wayne Phillips introduce the world to twinBASIC at the Access DevCon Vienna conference. I boldly predicted that twinBASIC (along with the Monaco editor) would replace VBA and its outdated development environment by 2025. With that goal in mind, this weekly update is my attempt to keep the project fresh in the minds of the VBA development community.

Every Sunday Monday week, I will be providing updates on the status of the project, linking to new articles discussing twinBASIC, and generally trying to increase engagement with the project. If you come across items that should be included here, please leave a comment below.

Here are some links to get involved with the project:

• Custom twinBASIC IDE Installation Guide
• twinBASIC Discord Server (chat about the project)
• twinBASIC Wiki (list of new features not in VBx)
• GitHub Issue Tracker (report bugs)
• twinBASIC/VBx LinkedIn Group

Highlights

Next Release Date: Tuesday, November 11th

Per Wayne in Discord:

Plus a sneak preview of what to expect in that release:

And an even sneakier preview of what to expect next year:

December v1.0 Release Target Confirmed

A promising Q&A between Wayne and a new Discord user:

Q: Is twinBASIC on track to a December v1.0 release?

A: We’re still aiming for the v1.0 release around December — if it slips, it’ll likely only be by a month.

Discord Chat Summary

^{* Auto-generated via Claude-Sonnet-4.5}

Overview

The week saw extensive technical discussions around Cairo graphics integration, WinRT development, and design patterns in twinBASIC. Community members explored cross-platform graphics solutions, debated language features like anonymous functions and multiple inheritance, and shared sophisticated WinRT implementations. Wayne announced the next release date (Nov 11th) and confirmed ByVal UDT support for non-complex types, while discussions about twinBASIC's evolution toward self-hosting and modern development patterns highlighted the project's maturation.

Graphics & Cairo Development

• yereverluvinunclebert made significant progress migrating from RichClient to the community-driven vbCairo wrapper, discovering that RC's heavy abstraction obscures Cairo's native functions and limits portability potential
• The community discussed cross-platform graphics approaches, with Cairo emerging as the preferred solution over Windows-specific technologies like WinRT or Direct2D for multi-platform compatibility
• Extensive technical discussions covered Cairo callback implementation challenges in VB6 versus twinBASIC, with fafalone providing guidance on CDecl callbacks using The trick's addin
• waynephillipsea clarified that VB6's conditional compilation blocks ignore syntax errors in inactive code paths, enabling common VB6/tB codebases

WinRT Integration & Modern Patterns

• deletedewd showcased impressive WinRT implementations including async/await simulation using MsgWaitForMultipleObjects and DoEvents, creating efficient non-blocking operations without true language-level async support
• Demonstrated practical WinRT applications: MediaPlayer, StreamSocket-based chat application, and modern UI elements like MessageBoxes and PopupMenus
• XelNiya provided extensive explanations of modern design patterns (Builder, Dependency Injection, MVVM) and their implementation challenges in twinBASIC versus .NET, highlighting the value of anonymous functions
• Community debated the merits of various design patterns for team development and code maintainability, with mansellan emphasizing the importance of package systems and IoC patterns

Language Features & Type System

• waynephillipsea announced ByVal UDT support coming in the next release for non-complex types (no Strings, Variants, Objects, or dynamic Arrays), addressing a major interop limitation
• Detailed discussions on multiple inheritance implementation in twinBASIC, with fafalone explaining the new Inherits A, B syntax and its differences from VB.NET's interface-based approach
• XelNiya analyzed VB6's type system inconsistencies around arrays and Decimals, explaining why treating arrays as objects (as in .NET) provides better type system consistency
• Community explored multidimensional array syntax and row-major vs column-major layout differences between VB and C/C++

Project Milestones & Community

• waynephillipsea confirmed next release date of November 11th and teased significant plans for 2026, stating he's "only just getting out of first gear"
• A potential commercial customer inquired about v1.0 timeline and CI/CD capabilities; Wayne confirmed December target (possibly slipping by one month) and provisional command-line build support
• XelNiya reflected on twinBASIC's 5+ year journey (development started 2019, public release April 2021), discussing the significance of self-hosting compilers as a maturity milestone
• bclothier confirmed self-hosting is a long-term post-v1 goal, with some components already written in tB and plans to leverage LLVM for optimization

Conclusion

The week demonstrated twinBASIC's growing sophistication as developers tackled advanced scenarios like WinRT integration and cross-platform graphics. The announcement of ByVal UDT support represents another step toward full VB6 compatibility while enabling better C/C++ interop. Discussions around design patterns and language evolution show the community thinking beyond VB6 parity toward modern development practices. With the November 11th release approaching and Wayne's enthusiasm for 2026 plans, the project continues its steady march toward v1.0 while maintaining focus on practical developer needs and real-world use cases.

Around the Web

reddit: Anyone still using VB6 in 2025?

Multiple mentions of twinBASIC in this reddit post. As well there should be in 2025...

WebView2 very simple

User feldharke posted this "very simple" demo of using the WebView2 control in the show-and-tell channel. Follow this link or click on the image below to download the .twinproj file from Discord:

Changelog

Here are the updates from the past week. You can also find this information by visiting the GitHub twinBASIC Releases page.

Releases · WaynePhillipsEA/twinbasic

Contribute to WaynePhillipsEA/twinbasic development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHubWaynePhillipsEA

• No new releases this week.