Can RAD Basic Revive Classic Visual Basic 6? A Deep Dive

New News about Visual Basic

Visual Basic 6 has been discontinued for nearly two decades, but a new project called RAD Basic promises a fully compatible solution for the abandoned event‑driven language.

Current Situation

Microsoft dropped Visual Basic 6 in favor of .NET and C#, yet many developers still rely on VB6 solutions in enterprise environments. Existing migration tools are unsatisfactory, and VB6 code cannot run unchanged on .NET.

RAD Basic claims to fill this gap by offering 100% compatibility with VB6 and positioning itself as the long‑awaited Visual Basic 7.

Author and Motivation

The project is led by Carles Royan, a software engineer with about 15 years of experience, who previously worked on compilers, ANTLR, and Hibernate. He started RAD Basic because Visual Basic was his first language and he believes it enables rapid development with minimal code.

New Features of RAD Basic

Version 0.5.0 Alpha 3 focuses on IDE improvements, adding support for creating new projects and managing controls in the form designer.

Goals of RAD Basic

RAD Basic aims to be an open‑source, fully compatible successor to VB6, effectively acting as a Visual Basic 7 that can run on Windows x86/x64, with future support for macOS and Linux.

Other VB Alternatives

Other projects pursuing VB6 compatibility include twinBasic and FreeBASIC, which also target legacy VB and VBA codebases.

Conclusion

RAD Basic seeks to revive classic Visual Basic development by providing an open‑source, fully compatible environment, addressing the community’s need for a sustainable VB6 replacement.