When comparing AutoIt 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 AutoIt is ranked 7th. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Rich library included
Standard library includes solutions for all occasions allowing, in addition to capturing windows, keyboard and mouse events, to create a GUI, access Obj / COM, system processes and threads, the registry, MS Office applications, work with the network and databases.
Pro Compiles into portable executable
Interpretable code can be flexibly compiled into compact executable file.
Pro Easy to learn and start to use
Simple BASIC-like syntax and close documentation with clear examples.
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 Closed-source
Being a closed-source scripting language creates security concerns such as hidden back doors.
Con Unfriendly forum
Has well known reputation of the forum being unfriendly to newbies and casuals.
Con Basic-like syntax
Basic-like syntax is much less used these days than C-like syntax.
Con Inappropriate standard code editor
The default code editor SciTE is simple but extremely difficult to tune, not recommended for beginners. Alternative editors are weak for AutoIt.
Con Lack of flexibility and power
Many necessary things, for example, capturing and analyzing screen pixels or capturing keystrokes by their scan codes, are implemented only through direct access to the Win API through a rather cumbersome code.
Con Ceased to develop
Bugs are slowly fixed and the last major update was many years ago.
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).