Tonight's online talk was by Daryl Dudley, with a starting audience of 45 people.
 
Daryl started off by introducing himself. In real life he is a principal sales engineer, using lots of programming languages. Started with a Master 128 back in the 1980s. A keen Pi user. Long term forum lurker....
 
DARIC is a modern BASIC inspired by BBC BASIC and BlitzBasic. It uses a VM with no real memory limits. Ultimate goal is native compilation.
 
In 2017 inspired to recreate Zarch. BBC BASIC was too slow and not an assembly language fan. So started a C based module with a 3D graphics library. This was shown at London Show 2019.
 
This was still tricky to debug and slow to compile. Also wanted to port code to Master 128 with PiTube. Lots of input and inspiration from Rob Coleman. PiBasic was born. Realised it was getting good performance and in some cases faster than BBC BASIC V as statically types and compiled to byte code. Removed BBC BASIC compatibility requirement and wrote version 2. Now at version 6. Developed on Visual Studio and targeted at RISC OS. HAs moved away from BBC BASIC syntax.
 
Ported lots of Java and Blitz projects.
 
The goals of Daric are to be:-
1. Fun
2. Clean syntax.
3. Cross-platform
4. Interactive mode.
5. "Batteries included"
6. Near Instant run
7. Integrated 2D/3D graphics
8. Hardware acceleration where possible.
9. Sprite model.
10. Entity model
11. Tile Maps
12. Sound support with synthesis, samples and music.
 
The architecture of Daric is:-
1. Antlr4 based parser.
2. 3 pass Compiler.
3. Runtime with stack based VM and a debugger.
 
Based on C++11 and cross-platform.
 
Daryl next showed us to demos of Daric code running on his Pi and some sample source code.Language has built-in debugging on F10 key. Does not do textures yet.
 
The talk ended as usual with the chance to ask lots of questions
 
Next month on 19th April the speaker will be Sophie Wilson.
 
More details of talks are on the ROUGOL site