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Add to SafariWhen comparing Gosu 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 Gosu is ranked 50th. 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
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Lightweight
Gosu is not a game development framework, only a media library that happens to be suited to game development. (Kind of like SDL in the C world.) That means the interface is relatively small.
Pro Mature API, actively maintained and developed
Gosu has been under development since 2001. It is mature and has several toolkits built on top of it to provide additional functionality.
Pro Cross-platform, even mobile, using Ruby
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 Deploying Ruby apps is a mess
Games built with the Ruby to .exe "compiler" do nothing more than extract your source code and Ruby.exe to %TEMP%, then run it. The code is not really compiled at all. The process for wrapping games as Mac apps is a bit nicer, but you'll need a paid Apple Developer subscription to code sign the app, or users will see a warning/error when running your game.
The only way to really compile Ruby is to use RubyMotion, which does not work on Windows and requires a paid subscription on top of the Apple Developer one.
(This Con is not specific to Gosu. Deploying Ruby code has never been fun.)
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.
