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VB6 brain, modern engine: BASIC syntax inside Godot 4 (public beta)

I’ve been building Visual Gasic — a real programming language that keeps the parts of VB6 we actually miss, not as a nostalgia toy, but as something you can ship games with today.

What feels familiar

Sub / Function / End Sub
Dim x As String, If … Then … End If
Event handlers by name: Sub btnStart_Click(), Sub Form_Load()
Properties on controls: Caption, Left, Top, Width, Height, Visible, Enabled
Timers: Interval, Enabled, Sub tmrGame_Timer()

What’s different (on purpose)

Runs as a Godot 4.6 plugin (GDExtension) — 2D/3D, export, modern engine
No COM, no ActiveX, no 32-bit Windows lock-in — Linux + Windows installers exist
Built for reading code — especially AI-generated code — not clever one-liners

Example that should look like home:

Sub btnPlay_Click()
    If lblScore.Caption = "" Then
        lblScore.Caption = "0"
    End If
    tmrGame.Enabled = True
End Sub
Sub tmrGame_Timer()
    Dim score As Long
    score = CLng(lblScore.Caption) + 1
    lblScore.Caption = CStr(score)
End Sub

Why I care as a former VB6 person: the thing that killed us wasn’t the syntax — it was tooling and platform. This keeps the syntax that made forms and line-by-line debugging easy, and puts it on an engine people still use in 2026.

There’s also an in-editor AI pair (Narcea) that writes .vg in this style — but the pitch is the opposite of “trust the black box”: the language is verbose on purpose so you can audit what it wrote.

Status: public beta (5.4.x). Form designer is experimental; the active path is Godot’s editor + VG script tabs. Honest about rough edges — see known issues on GitHub.

Links

If you still have .frm muscle memory or half-finished VB6 projects in a drawer — curious whether this feels like a natural step or a weird fork. What would you need to take it seriously: IDE parity, database stuff, report writer, something else?

r/visualbasic