When comparing Gambas vs twinBASIC, the Slant community recommends twinBASIC for most people. In the question“What are the best BASIC-like programming languages?” twinBASIC is ranked 3rd while Gambas is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose twinBASIC is:
Any code that runs in VB6 will run in twinBASIC (once v1 is released). Code that runs in VBA will also run in twinBASIC, though you need to account for any dependencies on the host application's object model (e.g., the Excel or Access Application object).
Specs
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Pros
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
Pro 100% Backward Compatible with VB6/VBA
Any code that runs in VB6 will run in twinBASIC (once v1 is released). Code that runs in VBA will also run in twinBASIC, though you need to account for any dependencies on the host application's object model (e.g., the Excel or Access Application object).
Pro No runtime requirement
The lack of a runtime dependency makes twinBASIC applications very lightweight and portable. Additionally, compiled executables only include necessary code from any referenced libraries. The classic "Hello, World" program compiles down to an 8 KB .exe with no external dependencies.
Pro Compile DLLs to extend VBA functionality
Can be used to extend VBA functionality by compiling standard and ActiveX DLLs in both 32 and 64bit.
Pro 64bit compilation is supported
64bit compilation is supported, as well as 32bit.
Pro At last! a replacement for VB6
At last there is a replacement for Microsoft VB6 - and for VBA too - twinBASIC programming.
Cons
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).