Hi Brice,
My deepest thanks for all your good words towards FBSL and for high esteem of my modest abilities.
Gerome was the author of FBSL v1 and 2, and a minor co-developer of v3, and as such has historically retained his copyright over the entire project. I contributed to v1 a lot but was out of reach and unable to contribute when v2 was emerging and used around the years of 2003 to 2005.
Strategic planning, optimization and practically all advanced feature development in v3 were totally my sole responsibility. Moreover, the very heart of FBSL v3, its universal internal and external dynamic typeless call stack and interface with 3rd party modules, was implemented based on my ASM code developed when I had been still taking interest in BCX winding progress as early as 2001 or 2002.
Mehdi grew up and left for the States to study and then work for Google and contributed nothing more than the initial barebones console and the Variant tree structure of a BASIC REPL interpreter, and some basic OOP stuff. Gerome's contribution to v3 was limited chiefly to initial COM interface and supervision over Mehdi's early C exercises.
And then later he abstained from taking part in FBSL development or forum altogether, although nominally he still kept his ownership rights to FBSL as a whole.
FBSL BASIC reached its physical limits as a hard-to-maintain mixture of bytecode interpreter with heavy rudiments of its tokenized REPL past, and has become a neck stone for its far more advanced assembler and C JIT cohabitants.
If FBSL were ever to revive, its BASIC component should've been completely remodeled from an interpreter into a full scale JIT compiler (pretty much like O2) to perform no worse than its ASM and C counterparts and be able to compile directly to machine code. And of course the entire trio should've moved to 64 bits on a few popular platforms.
I did some basic console-only prototyping of the new v4 design, but alas... Another factor, a general and dramatic drop of public interest in BASIC that Aurel has rightfully pointed out, stopped me from going any further as I lost motivation. And I just wouldn't want to make commitments that I wouldn't be able to deliver for whatever reason, primarily due to being insufficiently motivated. By motivation I mean not so much financial benefits but rather the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction with the fruit of my work.
So I quit and went in for my other hobbies. I do not think I'll be feeling like coming back to BASIC development any time soon. But as they say, if you want to see God laugh in your face, just tell him about your intentions.
