This is the first official release of the revived BASIC-256, continuing the classic educational BASIC environment from the original SourceForge 2.0.0.11 codebase. It modernises the whole stack — Qt6, CMake, a unified CI pipeline — and adds a browser build, so BASIC-256 now runs with no install at all.
Highlights
- Qt6 throughout. Migrated from Qt5, which unlocked everything below.
- Runs in your browser. A full Qt-for-WebAssembly build of the editor and interpreter, with no install needed — try it here.
- Four platforms, one pipeline. Windows, Linux x86-64, Raspberry Pi (ARM64) and macOS (Apple Silicon), each built and TestSuite-gated in CI.
- A new documentation site, a Docusaurus rebuild of the help, wired up as the in-app online help with F1 jumping straight to the keyword.
- Open Example on the desktop, browsable as a category tree — previously this was WebAssembly-only. On macOS the examples ship inside the
.app. - 64-bit integers for larger whole-number ranges.
- An expanded command line: graphics-only (
-g) and text-only (-t) windows, a fullscreen flag (-f) and a silent/headless mode (-s).
Running a program straight from a link
The browser build accepts parameters in the URL: ?run= runs a bundled example, ?url= runs a .kbs file hosted on the same site, and ?src= runs base64-encoded source embedded in the link itself. Add &mode= to pick the window layout, mirroring the command-line switches.