300,000 Downloads Later Small Basic 0.9 Is Available

A Microsoft project designed to introduce kids and beginner devs to software development is enjoying a consistent amount of success. According to the Redmond company, Small Basic has passed the 300,000-downloads milestone. Existing users are bound to add even more downloads, as the software giant has released the ninth installment of Small Basic. Version 0.9 of Small Basic brings to the table performance enhancements, as well as generic improvements, new features and bug fixes.

“Firstly, the Small Basic compiler and runtime have been overhauled and the result is a big performance gain. Some tight loop programs run up to 4 times faster than the previous versions,” a member of the Small Basic team noted.

Microsoft explained that increasing speed was in fact the primary focus of delivering Small Basic 0.9. Developers that will upgrade to the latest iteration of the programming environment and language will be able to both enjoy extra speed and also offer better performing software to users. At the same time, the libraries accompanying Small Basic have been expanded.

“We now have a Controls object that allows you to add Buttons and TextBoxes and react to click and text change events. The Shapes object adds support for adding/modifying, animating and zooming text. This is extremely useful for displaying and updating text frequently, like the score in a game. The Sound object now has a new operation, PlayMusic, which plays music described by a subset of Music Markup Language supported by QBasic. An example is: Sound.PlayMusic("O5 C8 C8 G8 G8 A8 A8 G4 F8 F8 E8 E8 D8 D8 C4"),” the Small Basic team representative added.

Among the most important bug fixes with the new version of Small Basic, Microsoft emphasized a modification in the development solution’s default extension for documents. Small Basic 0.9 documents are labeled with a default extension of “.smallbasic” instead of “.sb.” The Redmond company explained that the change was necessary in order to avoid conflicts with MIT’s Scratch.

“Last, but certainly not the least, is the support for right-to-left languages and the first localized language in that series is Arabic. Also included are Dutch and Polish versions, bringing the count of supported languages to 15,” the member of the Small Basic team said.

Small Basic 0.9 is available for download here.