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Not just any old BASIC, either: OS-9’s BASIC09
Neither LLVM nor GCC directly support the BASIC programming language – but a former Microware boffin proposes fixing that.An interesting new proposal on the Discourse forum of the LLVM compiler suite has turned into a new standalone BASIC compiler. The original RFC was Adding BASIC09 frontend tool to LLVM. Author Boisy Petre proposed adding a front-end to enable LLVM to compile BASIC source code, and this has now turned into a standalone compiler called basic09c, which uses LLVM as a library. We are irresistibly reminded of the recent addition of ALGOL-68 to GCC. As we said in 2023, BASIC is anything but dead, and, for BASIC’s 60th birthday, the following year we covered new versions of three modern FOSS dialects. The late Dr Thomas Kurtz would have been proud.
It’s not just any old home-computer BASIC, either. Dr Petre is working on a compiler for Microware BASIC09. This was one of the compilers that Microware offered for its multitasking, multiuser Unix-like OS, called OS-9. Way back in 1999, many users of Apple’s then-new MacOS 9 – often just called “OS 9” – confused it with the already 20-year-old Microware OS-9, and they pestered OS-9 newsgroups and communities with Mac questions and chatter. As The Register reported back then, Microware even sued Apple over the trademark.
