# Gambas

7 Hacker News commenters recommended Gambas and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend Gambas as a free, open source Basic-based development environment for quickly building GUIs and standalone programs, with a Visual Basic-like feel.

## Why people recommend it

- Free open source Basic development platform (2 comments): "GAMBAS is a free development environment and a full powerful object-oriented language and development platform based on a Basic interpreter" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982210)) "pure opensource goodness I'll port it Gambas" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755479))
- Familiar Visual Basic-style development (2 comments): "for the slightly younger folks who have more memories of Visual Basic than QBasic" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49291887)) "FreePascal, Gambas, Xojo and C++ Builder" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119308))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [JetBrains IDEs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/jetbrains-ides.md): 233 recommend
- [IntelliJ IDEA](https://hackerapproved.com/p/intellij-idea.md): 206 recommend
- [Microsoft Visual Studio](https://hackerapproved.com/p/visual-studio.md): 165 recommend
- [Delphi](https://hackerapproved.com/p/delphi.md): 126 recommend
- [Xcode](https://hackerapproved.com/p/xcode.md): 100 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Gambas", https://hackerapproved.com/p/gambas/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).