Editing Gambas (section)

== History ==
Gambas was developed by the [[French people|French]] programmer [[Benoît Minisini]], with its first release coming in 1999. Benoît had grown up with the BASIC language, and decided to make a free software development environment that could quickly and easily make programs with user interfaces.<ref name="influenced"/>

The Gambas 1.x versions were first released on January 4, 2005,<ref>{{cite web|url=https://lwn.net/Articles/117951/|title=Gambas - a BASIC Development Environment|date=2005-01-05|access-date=2024-02-25|author=Cook|website=LWN.net}}</ref> and featured an interface made up of several different separate windows for forms and IDE dialogues in a similar fashion to [[GIMP#User interface|the interface]] of earlier versions of the [[GIMP]]. It could also only develop applications using [[Qt (software)|Qt]] and was more oriented towards the development of applications for [[KDE]].<ref name="codefez">{{cite web | url=http://codefez.com/gambas-a-fast-visual-basic-for-linux/ | title=Gambas: A Fast Visual Basic for Linux | publisher=CodeFez | access-date=2007-04-04 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090909105431/http://codefez.com/gambas-a-fast-visual-basic-for-linux/ | archive-date=2009-09-09 | url-status=dead }}</ref>  The last release of the 1.x versions was Gambas 1.0.19.

[[Image:Gambas-ubuntu.png|200px|right|thumb|Gambas 2.7 with Russian interface]]
The first of the 2.x versions was released on January 2, 2008, after three to four years of development. It featured a major redesign of the interface, now with all forms and functions embedded in a single window, as well as some changes to the Gambas syntax, although for the most part code compatibility was kept. It featured major updates to existing Gambas components as well as the addition of some new ones, such as new components that could use [[GTK+]] or [[Simple DirectMedia Layer|SDL]] for drawing or utilize [[OpenGL]] acceleration. Gambas 2.x versions can load up and run Gambas 1.x projects, with occasional incompatibilities; the same is true for Gambas 2.x to 3.x, but not from Gambas 1.x to 3.x.

The next major iteration of Gambas, the 3.x versions, was released on December 31, 2011.<ref name="TheH">{{cite web | url=http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Gambas-3-0-for-BASIC-with-bug-and-security-fixes-1403082.html | title=Gambas 3.0 for BASIC with bug and security fixes | publisher=The H | access-date=2012-01-05}}</ref> A 2015 benchmark published on the Gambas website showed Gambas 3.8.90 scripting as being faster to varying degrees than [[Perl]] 5.20.2 and the then-latest 2.7.10 version of [[Python (programming language)|Python]] in many tests.<ref name="benchmark">{{cite web | url=http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/doc/benchmark | title=Benchmarking | publisher=Gambas Website| access-date=2018-02-11}}</ref> Version 3.16.0 released on April 20, 2021, featured full support for [[Wayland (display server protocol)|Wayland]] using the graphical components, as well as parity between the Qt 5 and GTK 3 components.<ref name="wayland">{{cite web | url=http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/doc/release/3.16.0?nh | title=3.16.0 release notes | publisher=Gambas Website |access-date=2021-02-11}}</ref>