When comparing Visual Basic vs Gambas, the Slant community recommends Gambas for most people. In the question“What are the best BASIC-like programming languages?” Gambas is ranked 5th while Visual Basic is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Gambas is:
You can't find such a level of easy GUI development in any other language on the Linux platform.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Very simple and efficient language (in terms of number of lines of code)
Pro Easy to learn
Pro Capable language
Compiling to the same intermediate language as C# and compiling against the same .NET libraries, the differences between C# and VB are largely syntactic. Most VB features even have a 1:1 correspondence with C#.
Pro Huge community
Being Microsoft's introductory language, visual basic has a strong and large community.
Pro English-like syntax
Pro Flexible, won't get in the way of a beginner
A beginner developer can worry about the code logic first, and then learn the language. Visual Basic lets you do basically anything if you really want, while still having the power to be a fully statically-typed and object oriented.
Pro Sibling to C#
If you don't want to start with C# because of its high learning floor, you can start with VB. It is dead easy to switch between the two.
Pro Easy to deal with Win32API
Using platform invoke, it's very easy to use the win32 api in vb.net. Neat and clean syntax. Not a mess like c# (meaning those "{}"s).
Pro Complete IDE for GUI development
You can't find such a level of easy GUI development in any other language on the Linux platform.
Pro Constantly updated
New features and bug fixes along with performance enhancements.
Pro Easy to get started for someone familiar with VB on Windows
Pro Complete application development suite
Supports GTK and QT along with web. Built in Form building with JIT speed. If you are developing an application targeting Linux only give this a look.
Pro Fast to write apps
Pro Git integration
Integration with GIT in IDE and easy to distribute apps as source package with export as .tar.gz.
Pro Enhanced with a new test suite
Pro Runs on Windows 10 WSL2 environment, reported successful compilation on MacOS
Cons
Con Almost as bad as Python, but less used
Con Bad reputation
Being a visual basic programmer, you're unlikely to be taken seriously by other programmers. According to the 2015 Stack Overflow survey, it was voted the second most dreaded language among developers.
Con Tends to get clunky due to prebuilt assets
Con Not cross platform
Con The documentation is not the best
Con May have trouble interfacing to C code structs
Managed struct objects in Gambas makes it harder to use with C code structs.
Con Difficult to satisfy runtime requirements
Runtime requirements to run applications written in Gambas are not always easy to satisfy (that is, without installing the whole development environment).