Commercial Dev Tool vendor adds ARM64 and "Dark Mode" for Linux
Commercial Dev Tool vendor adds ARM64 and "Dark Mode" for Linux
The multi-platform Xojo IDE (Mac, Windows, iOS) keeps beefing up their Linux support. Which pleases Lunduke.
I’m a big fan of commercial software supporting Linux. Big, big fan.
When I see game developers and publishers throw their weight behind Linux, it makes my heart sing. Even when those games are closed source, it’s worth supporting their endeavors to support one of my favorite open source operating systems.
But, lately, commercial game developers have been adding support for Linux right and left. What’s more rare is seeing commercial productivity and software development tools focusing on Linux.
With that in mind I want to direct your attention to the folks over at Xojo, who have just released a new update to their Visual BASIC inspired integrated development environment — “Xojo 2022 Release 4” — with a serious focus on Linux.
This level of Linux support is worth calling out and praising.
What is Xojo, you ask?
Imagine Visual BASIC (not that new-fangled VB.NET shlop… but old-school VB). Now spruce it up a bit — make everything very Object Oriented with lots of dot-notation. . Then make it so that it builds native executables for Linux, macOS, Windows, and iOS.
(Repeat: Not interpreted. This isn’t your father’s BASIC interpreter. We’re talking about fast, native binaries. For all supported platforms.)
It’s quite slick.
The whole thing got its start back on classic MacOS, when it used to be called “REALbasic”. Eventually it was ported to Windows, then Linux. Along the way their team changed the name to “Xojo” (I assume to avoid some sort of stigma that many programmers have with BASIC-derived languages).
Linux-y stuff in the new release
Their team added some really cool stuff in their new update, but I wanted to call out their Linux support in particular.
First: ARM64 Linux binaries
Besides being able to build Linux executables for your typical x86/64 type CPUs… Xojo also has had the ability to build 32bit ARM binaries for quite some time. (Heck, they even have an ARM compiler for Windows.)
But now they’ve included a full ARM64 compiler for Linux. Which means you can build 64 bit applications targeted at, say, a Raspberry Pi 4. Quite cool.
One extra neat thing… is that you can make builds for ARM64 Linux… from any platform Xojo runs on. And you can even debug on remote machines. Meaning you can run the Xojo IDE on a Windows box… and have Xojo compile for ARM64 Linux, copy the binary over to your Raspberry Pi, launch it, and debug it remotely.
And you can do that with any combination of platforms. Build and remote debug a Windows application from Linux, and so forth. Just nifty.
Second: Dark Mode support
This may not be a critical thing for a dev tool, but the fact that the Xojo team took the time to fully and properly support dark mode (based on system settings) in both the IDE and built applications… well… that speaks to their level of commitment to the platform.
Petty cool, right?
So, kudos to the developers that made this happen. And a big high-five to their company for investing in such excellent Linux support. That sort of thing is well deserving of praise.
Note: I have absolutely no affiliation with the company behind this IDE. But I’ve used it in the past and tested the current versions out enough to be excited at their level of support for so many platforms.