Despite Microsoft's move from VB6 to an all .NET strategy, there continue to be a variety of BASIC programming languages which attract programmers. Here are several lists which break out the various BASIC dialects, providing information to help you select the one that's best for you.

These lists are limited to only those dialects which will generate Windows EXE files.

Commercial Freeware

Other Most Popular

You may also find my section on comparison of language functions helpful in selecting a language for your programming needs.

Recommendations
I'm not through with my review of all the dialects, but if you need an immediate recommendation on a dialect, then consider the following Google search results. The dialects shown in bold have a significantly greater Internet presence than other competing dialects.

In this list I've separated the commercial and free dialects. Also, the game and scripting dialects are shown separately regardless of their free/commercial status.

	Commercial			Free			Games - Commercial			Scripting
	REALBasic PureBasic PowerBASIC NSBasic Liberty BASIC BBC BASIC Phrogram VPBasicPro HTBasic Ubercode Run BASIC HotBasic	1,260,000 883,000 324,000 121,000 103,000 44,500 28,600 20,500 13,100 6,520 5,090 4,430		thinBasic FreeBASIC GFA-Basic KBasic FBSL Emergence BASIC Gambas XBLite Just BASIC D-LIB FNXBasic Creative BASIC	604,000 207,000 32,700 25,300 22,000 21,500 15,000 10,500 7,710 6,380 542 95		DarkBASIC Blitz BASIC Play Basic glBasic Brutus2D   Games - Free sdlBasic basic4gl XST Basic	931,000 872,000 168,000 25,600 7,610   608,000 512,000 99		Autoit ScriptBasic SmallBASIC RapidBATCH         Kids Euphoria BASIC-256	1,710,000 19,900 18,400 6,750   59,500 15,400

Notes on Google Search Results
As I've looked into general BASIC or scripting popularity on the web, I must say I'm surprised at the size of the Google hits on some of the packages. However, as a point of reference, a Google search on "Visual Basic" returns a hit of 64,000,000 - over 5 times the total hits on all other BASIC dialects combined. I'll continue looking to see if there are any factors which may change the results.

In some cases I had to adjust the search terms to avoid clearly incorrect results. Here are the search terms used where the simple dialect name alone did not give good results: VPBasic, Euphoria+programming+language, JustBASIC, D-LIB+BASIC+programming, scripting+language+"D-LIB ", programming+language+"quite basic", BlitzBASIC, XSTBasic

More Google hits does not necessarily mean a better language, but would seem to be a good first indicator of the popularity of the dialects. For example, the PowerBASIC dialect is considered to provide the fastest performance, even though it's hit count is only 1/3 of the REALBasic hit count. REALBasic on the other hand, is considered to have one of the best user interfaces, hence it's popularity. So be sure to look at dialects a few places up or down the list to make sure you get a good understanding of what the competitive dialects have to offer.

Information Center BASIC Sections
In addition to these comprehensive lists, I have specific sections at this site which provide additional information on several of the BASIC dialects, including:

• PowerBASIC
• REALBasic
• PureBasic
• QBasic

I hope to add sections on other dialects over the next few months.