However, it must also be noted that the Open Source ecosystem for Realbasic is also weak. Consider what is available online – the bulk appears to have been released by users who would be considered “professional” more than “hobbyist”.

Now the dividing line between “professional” and “hobbyist” is blurry anyway. A much more important distinction is between “producers” and “consumers”. Some people create useful stuff, whether for payment or for free. Other people just want solutions handed to them; that is not a problem _so long and they are prepared to put something back_. Either that is with money supporting a professional 3rd party solution environment, or with time and effort supporting an open source environment.

The problem is when the level of parasitic consumers, who reject paid for solutions but either cannot or will not work to support an open source community, gets too high. In that case the whole support community will fade away. Again IMO that has not occurred yet but it could easily do so: those who do not want to use a paid for solution should stop whinging and maybe start an open source project for a free alternative.

Meanwhile Real Software do need to assist the paid-for 3rd Party environment to develop and you’ve already mentioned what you think is needed for that.

As for LLVM, I don’t see that as being much of an issue at all. Problems in LLVM have had to be tackled by Apple (and maybe the Linux community) already. LLVM is mostly just a swappable replacement for gcc.

The main problem I have (and have had for the past couple of years) is that RS release schedules are so short that by the time an alpha/beta is at the stage I can test it (on my humongous app), it’s too late to fix fundamental problems before the thing goes FC. I was not able to use three out of the last six releases because of (relatively major) bugs (the big database rewrite fiasco, contextual menus in Windows on tab panels, and bevelbutton problems on Windows, amongst others. 2010r1 seems OK, but I dread the upcoming Cocoa-support and LLVM releases.

The lack of this feature in the Real Studio IDE severely limits Real Studio as a professional tool. IDEA, a Java IDE from a _small_ company (also with limited resources), has hundreds of plugins that improve the product immensely and helped create a healthy third-party tool ecosystem.

A few years ago, I worked feverishly (as a labor of love) on a program called Reality Check that would bring to REALbasic what other IDEs had as an add-on: checking for errors in program _design_ and automatically fixing them. Due to the lack of IDE plug-ins or access to compiler symbol information, I had to import and export RB projects (instead of working within the IDE), start writing an entire compiler front end to get symbol information, and write a program to parse the RB documentation to build the beginnings of a symbol table. My other IDEs gave programmers access to this information in a controlled manner through a plugin API that kept almost all plugins from having deleterious interactions with the IDE when bugs existed.

By making the IDE a closed system, Real Software prevented yet another third-party tool from being developed (anybody remember the SlayFire Reality profiler?). The third-party tool market for RB is nearly non-existent. This diminishes the RB ecosystem immensely and prevents Real Studio from being an enterprise-ready tool. If Real Software truly has limited resources and can’t do much, why not let the community fill the gap and help add tools to improve the product? (By the way, my product was open source and free of cost so it would benefit no one but Real Software and REALbasic users). Instead, the enthusiasm of those who want to help improve Real Studio is dampened. It is a shame.

Regarding pricing of third party plug-ins, they will sell at what the market will bear. Some will be fine with the price, some will not. That’s the nature of selling just about anything. We don’t focus on the hobbyist but we don’t turn them away either because some hobbyists eventually become full time developers. We certainly don’t want to create a barrier to entry.

So don’t worry Christian. Be happy.

A couple of weeks ago, I experienced the third-party backlash you mentioned, on the forums.

I really hope RS takes a good long look at the community and what the product has become, and starts doing the things it should be doing to target enterprise-level customers. You’ll make more money from those guys than the hobbyists.