XYplorer Beta Club

I was reading some rather critical comments concerning XYplorer, and they all seemed to agree it was written in VB6.

There is little commercial software still written in VB6, and while I already have a purchased, full copy of XYplorer, I need some convincing to keep using it and join this community. I'm not trying to be critical myself, VB6 is one of my favorite languages, and I wish Microsoft have extended it without abandoning BASIC... but it truly is slow and outdated.

Is there a reason why the author chose VB6? Is there a benefit I'm overlooking?
I really, really want to use this software, but I'm looking for efficiency, low memory usage, and speed in my file manager.

Thank you for any help! =3

Dusty wrote:I really, really want to use this software, but I'm looking for efficiency, low memory usage, and speed in my file manager.

Hi Dusty,

First off, welcome to the XY forums!

I think most of us are looking for the same things you are. As a side note, I think it's quite interesting that one of the biggest complaints some folks have against XY is the use of VB6. This strikes me as odd, since if it works well, what difference does it really make?

The criteria that I used before purchasing are just like yours: efficiency, speed, and low memory usage. In addition, I considered specific functionality that I wanted, and how actively the developer worked on the product. XY excelled in all areas (and has continued to make significant improvements on a very regular basis).

What I would recommend is that for the moment, ignore the issue of development language and 1) evaluate how XY works for you, and 2) determine if it meets your criteria. Even if VB6 as a whole is slower than other systems, Don has optimized many areas of XY such that it's VERY fast for almost everything I need it to do. I've seen plenty of poorly written programs in other "faster" languages whose performance is absolutely terrible -- as a result, the programmer's choice of development platform is not (in and of itself) sufficient reason for me to choose one product over another, and XY is a great example of that -- as long as it works for me, the programming language used is a very minor concern...

Anyway, welcome to the world of XY -- I hope you stick around and take advantage of the great knowledge base that the folks on this forum provide.

I hope this helps!

andy

Dusty wrote:I was reading some rather critical comments concerning XYplorer, and they all seemed to agree it was written in VB6.

First, I'll also extend a welcome to the forums! I'm a bit surprised that you're already a licensed user yet not a member of these forums. Please join us here on a daily basis and I think we'll quickly convince you why you should stay with XY no matter what it's written in.

Second, I've seen a couple of those comments and believe them to be from the "competition" and using the approach of, if you can't find anything else to pick on, attack the coding language. I'm convinced there are a large number of app's that are in VB6 which users are unaware of, and if it doesn't affect you, why should it matter?

I'm not very familiar with coding options, but one of the newer things appears to be .NET which seems to require a bloated overhead to support it...I'd rather an app use an older language where a large amount of reference resources are available for how to code in a tight manner.

So I'd look at what XY can do for you, and not be so concerned as how it does it...I think it's quite fast, uses memory effectively, and makes it efficient for users, but that's just my opinion.

Just let me add that VB6 compiles to Windows native code at which point it becomes completely irrelevant in which language the source code is written in. There is no VB6 in XYplorer.exe!

Also VB6 has full access to the Windows API. It can call Vista-only system functions without any problem although it's about 10 years older than Vista. On my web site Vbspeed it has been proven in countless instances that VB is just as fast as a language can get, and XYplorer makes the same point again. It's not the language, it's how you use it.