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EndBASIC 0.7: Hello, cloud!

Several months have passed since the last EndBASIC release and, since then, you might have seen me talk nonstop about an “EndBASIC service” in social media… which has sounded like vaporware. That changes today.

After about four months of work, I am ecstatic to announce that EndBASIC 0.7 is here. And these haven’t been four months of idle time. No, no, no. It has taken four months of my scarce free time to deliver this because 0.7 is a humongous release on various fronts.

EndBASIC 0.6 release announcement

After a very active month of development since the 0.5 announcement, it is time to welcome EndBASIC 0.6!

This new 0.6 release is super-exciting for three reasons:

• preliminary GPIO support in the standard library specifically tailored to the Raspberry Pi;
• multidimensional array support in the language; and
• availability of binary releases for the most common platforms.

You can dive right in by:

• visiting https://repl.endbasic.dev/ for an interactive session,
• reading more about the project at https://www.endbasic.dev/, or
• downloading and installing any of the new prebuilt binaries.

But stick around and continue reading if you are interested in many more details about these major changes 😉

Embedding EndBASIC into a (Rust) program

One thing that bothers me quite a lot about various language implementations is that the core of their interpreter isn’t clearly separate from their standard library. This makes it hard to embed those interpreters into other programs because it’s not obvious how to limit their side-effects and because the interpreter dependency can be heavy. In this post, we will see how EndBASIC’s design tries hard to keep the core as small as possible, and we will see some examples on how to use EndBASIC from Rust and vice versa.

EndBASIC 0.5 release announcement

A month has passed since the 0.4.0 announcement so it is about time to say hello to yet another EndBASIC release because 0.5.0 is here! So, what’s new? Not much… unless you look under the covers, in which case a ton has changed. About 30% of the codebase has been affected in one way or another to improve general quality, so read on to see how.

EndBASIC 0.4 release announcement

About a month ago and after a long hiatus, I published EndBASIC 0.3 and the adrenaline rush that came with it got my wheels spinning again full-steam ahead. So here I am today, ready to announce the 0.4 release. But… “what could have possibly changed in just a month of someone’s free time”, you wonder? Enough, actually!

EndBASIC 0.4 is the release that fulfills my original goal of being able to run a “guess the number” game. The “only” change needed after 0.3 to make this possible was the addition of random numbers, but these in turn required adding function calls to back RND() and also supporting floating point numbers because that’s what this function is supposed to return.