Visual Basic
The guide to Visual Basic.
- Overview and historyThe language node, its design goals, history, editions and releases, implementations.
- Getting startedInstall, toolchain, hello world, the REPL, running a program, project layout.
- Lexical structure and syntaxTokens, comments, identifiers, literals, operators and precedence, statements and expressions, the grammar.
- Values and typesThe built-in types, numbers, text, booleans, null and its friends, type conversions, the type system of the language.
- Variables, binding and scopeDeclarations, constants, scope rules, shadowing, lifetime.
- Control flowConditionals, loops, pattern matching, jumps, labelled blocks.
- FunctionsDefinitions, parameters, returns, closures, recursion, lambdas, overloading.
- Built-in collectionsArrays, lists, maps, sets, tuples, slices, ranges, iteration protocols, comprehensions.
- Strings and textString types, encodings, formatting and interpolation, regex support, Unicode handling.
- User-defined typesStructs, records, classes, enums, unions, interfaces, traits, protocols, generics.
- Errors and exceptionsThe error model, the exception hierarchy, error values, panics, cleanup.
- Memory and resourcesAllocation, the GC or ownership model, destructors, resource handling, unsafe code.
- Modules, packages and buildsThe module system, imports, visibility, packages, the package manager, the build tool, publishing.
- Concurrency and parallelismThreads, async, channels, the memory model of the language, synchronization in its stdlib.
- MetaprogrammingMacros, reflection, annotations, decorators, code generation, compile-time evaluation.
- The standard libraryA map of the standard library; the api cards hang here (one api group per module or package).
- I/O, files and the OSFiles, paths, processes, environment, time, networking from the stdlib.
- TestingThe test frameworks, assertions, mocking, test runners and conventions.
- ToolingCompilers and interpreters, debuggers, profilers, linters, formatters, LSP, notebooks.
- EcosystemThe main libraries and frameworks by need, the community, the governance and proposal process.
- PerformanceThe cost model, optimization guidance, the profiling workflow, the compilation and runtime knobs.
- InteroperabilityFFI, calling C, embedding, the ABI, interop with the platform languages.
- Idioms and styleThe style guide, the idioms, what code in this language should look like, naming conventions.
- PitfallsThe known traps, each as a feature or a short node, linked to diagnostics and weaknesses.
- Versions and migrationThe release nodes, the migration guides between major versions, deprecations and removals.
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