I posted Objo Studio here some months ago when it was much earlier in development and it didn’t get much attention. Since then it has changed quite a bit, so I thought it was worth showing again.
Objo Studio is my attempt to build a modern version of the kind of development environment I grew up enjoying: Visual Basic, REALbasic/Xojo, Delphi, etc. You visually design an interface, add event handlers and write code, without needing to understand complex frameworks before you can put a button on a window.
The big change since I last posted is that Objo can now build both *desktop and web applications* from the same IDE. Desktop applications target macOS, Windows and Linux.
Objo also has its own object-oriented programming language. Underneath it is a hand-crafted stack-based virtual machine (written in .NET), while the IDE and desktop UI framework uses Avalonia. Performance has been an important part of the project from the beginning: I want editing, compiling and running an application to feel immediate rather than having the development environment get in the way. Big shout out to Bob Nystrom for his Crafting Interpreters book which got me interested in compilers and interpreters in the first place.
The language is deliberately conventional. Classes, methods, properties, inheritance, enumerations, exceptions, collections and so on should all feel familiar if you’ve used languages such as BASIC, C# or similar. I’m not trying to invent a new programming paradigm - the goal is to make building small and medium-sized applications enjoyable and quick.
One of the nicest parts of working on it has been having a small group of people actually using it. Quite a few features and fixes have come from someone reporting a problem or saying "this workflow is awkward", and because the project is still small I'm able to turn those around fairly quickly.
Objo is obviously nowhere near as mature as tools that have been around for decades, and there are still plenty of things I want to add. But it has reached the point where people are building real applications with it, rather than it just being a language/IDE experiment.
I’m particularly interested in whether there is still a place for *visual RAD development* today, especially in the world of Vibe Coding. My feeling is that there are still people who enjoy crafting their code visually. I've been using it to teach my teenage daughter to code and she really likes it :)
If that idea interests you, I’d be very interested in any feedback.
Objo Studio: https://objo.dev
It's opinionated in that you basically can only edit code within Studio, but in exchange for that you get your code consistently and clearly organized along with your design notes and docs. It has basic GitHub support included.
Performance is very respectable, even impressive at times. Certainly adequate to its intended use cases. And a rich ABI is planned for calling C and .NET libraries, for the times you need the extra oomph.
I think Garry's architectural instincts are very good, and it's reflected in the product.
Perhaps the most pleasant part of testing this product has been Garry's incredible responsiveness and transparency; it's refreshing after years of dealing with large corporate-sponsored product development. I like the trend where more and more products of this type are being produced by smaller, leaner teams with a vision and passion for what they are doing.
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