The path to the future of Visual Basic and the path to the future of basic

The path to the future of Visual Basic and the path to the future of basic

Last week, Microsoft announced their idea of changing the future development plan of Visual Basic. This announcement left a lot of uncertainty for Visual Basic developers, but Anthony D. Green, the Visual Basic language designer, explained some details about this new strategy.
Green first lists the four basic guiding principles for development using VB:
1. Common IDE and platform building blocks shared by VB and C.
2. Shared "Multi-paradigm, object-oriented, imperative, and strong type" language features.
3. Strong cross-language interoperability and rich language innovation opportunities (such as generics, LINQ, and Asynchronization) are required at API boundaries ).
4. customer feedback on language tool parity.
Microsoft believes that VB is very suitable for developers or new programmers who use Windows as the target development platform (at least, programming is not their main profession ).
On the other hand, the rise of non-Windows platforms has a certain impact on C #, but does not affect VB. In Green's view, VB is not suitable for game development or Mac OS X-based development. VB is difficult to adapt to non-Windows platforms. F #'s open-source and C #'s increasing support for open-source tools, these two languages are superior to VB in attracting and retaining developers. More and more C # developers are entering a virtuous circle. They can bring more progress and attract more developers.
At last, Green proposed a situation where, if C # and VB development progress and functional features are kept in parallel, there will be pressure on limited resources. Microsoft wants to focus on C # because it provides the widest range of feedback in the fastest way. Once such feedback produces an idea that is valuable to VB developers, Microsoft will consider porting from C # to VB.
What does this mean for developers who want to know what their input in the VB language will return? The four principles listed earlier have been replaced by the following goals: Tools, platforms, and languages.
Green said that VB's quality tools are still the focus and mentioned how dynamic unit tests in Visual Studio 2017 support VB. Based on the platform, VB will still be maintained to support. NET Core's. NET standard. The VB language itself will also add new functions and keywords, but the premise is that they are meaningful to VB, not just because these features are added in C. The Green example says a string like a UTF-8 won't be added to VB.
The response of VB developers was intense, and many people expected VB to support multiple platforms, including Microsoft technologies such as HoloLens. Reed Kimble wrote: "This is a chicken and egg problem. Microsoft does not provide a function because they have not heard people's requirements. People do not require a feature because Microsoft has not yet provided it, so it must mean that people cannot obtain it.