Re: masm32 - Hutch

JGCASEY wrote:

> I was interested in the product myself but there
> isn't any Australian outlet and I hate to order
> things from overseas to find they aren't really
> what I thought they were.

PowerBASIC seems like a cute toy, but it's evangelized
to be a lot of things that it isn't. The machine code
generation is pretty poor (doesn't matter if you're
writing small toys, but does mean you will *have* to use
it's inline assembly facilities if you need do do any
kind of thing that requires a little grunt work).

It doesn't support static libraries, so if you want to
link with external code, you're stuck with DLLs (which
means additional work when other people provide static
libraries and no DLLs).

It's not all too flexible, in the sense that you can't
get rid of the runtime library code. Granted, the
default runtime library footprint is rather small in
PowerBASIC, but you can't get rid of it to produce *very*
small executables.

But if you don't care much about executable size and speed,
like the BASIC language, and need a tool to quickly
prototype things, PB might be the right thing for you.
It's a lot faster to set up windows and dialogs with their
proprietary system, than it is to go through all the trouble
of RegisterClass+CreateWindow , writing a WndProc, et cetera.

> I wondered how hard it would be to capture webcam
> images into an array using PowerBasic?

Try using the search feature on the win32asm community
board and search for "webcam", there's been at least
a couple of posts there by various people. It doesn't
involve any nonsense like "talking with an USB driver",
there's a set of API functions to interface with various
image capture devices.


.