When comparing Starling vs PureBasic, the Slant community recommends PureBasic for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” PureBasic is ranked 40th while Starling is ranked 78th. The most important reason people chose PureBasic is:
Can create single file executables without the need to install other libraries, run time environments, etc.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Lightweight
Starling is just 12k lines of code and doesn't try to do everything — but what it does, as efficient as possible.
Pro Feathers User Interface Components
With Feathers, you can easily add great user interfaces to your games — or even create business apps with Starling.
Pro Free and open source
Starling is available for free with code available on GitHub.
Pro Strong community support
Forum is always active with knowledgeable developers and with lot of inside info, and post mortems.
Pro Works with Flash
With UI, you can design it in Flash Professional (powerful 2D editor), export to swf file, use GAF convert swf file to gaf file, finnally, load gaf file to Starling. GAF can convert a lot of file swf to one atlas. Alway use same resource in design files (fla) to optimize atlas size, avoid duplicate asset in atlas.
You can use flash to create animation for starling.
Pro Hardware accelerated rendering
Let the GPU do the rendering, the CPU has more important tasks to do.
Pro Cross Platform
It can be exported to web flash player, iOS, Android, Windows, and OS X
Pro Works with AIR's native extensions
Using AIR's native extensions any native code that can be written can be run and used by the game engine.
Pro Constantly updated
New features are added regularly.
Pro Better performance than most alternatives
Starling can run more animated display objects than Unity2D and many others frameworks at 60 fps.
Pro Standalone executables
Can create single file executables without the need to install other libraries, run time environments, etc.
Pro The syntax is very beginner-friendly
Pro Same code on Windows, OS X and Linux
Same code can be compiled natively, without any interpreter for OS X, Windows or Linux, using the native GUI toolkit of the OS
Pro Many integrated features
Many libraries available without additional installations : 2D & 3D, database, network, sound, xml, JSON, http...
Pro Allows to program at a lower level than most alternatives
Pro Lifetime license
Pay once, use forever.
Pro Constantly updated
Pro Supports ARM in addition to x86, AMD64 and others
Pro Can compile to plain C code
Pro Grest user community / forums with the developer very active
Cons
Con Poor text/font support
It supports only 4 features for text rendering:
- bitmap font with batching.
1.1. basic distance fields with support for outline and filters via MeshStyle.
1.2 the new multichannel distance field, the ultimate solution for bitmap font rendering. - Draw and upload texture in runtime
So every new text field required texture uploads or vertex/idnex buffer uploads.
skipUnchanchagedFrames keep the backbuffer static for scenes without changes between frames, leveraging a good rendering optimization.
Con Engine supported mainly by one man
Its open source but in most cases community features or pull request are canceled.
Con Limited free version
Free version is limited to 800 lines and can not create DLL's.
Con Some bugs are present on the Linux platform
Con Slightly bogged syntax
Sometimes the syntax bogs down, just a little with long procedure names and such. A truly minor issue.
Con Not RAD
Not a RAD environment.
