Roadmap

The Big One

GW-BASIC 2026 Compiler — ahead-of-time compilation of BASIC programs to native executables. Because nothing says "premature optimization" like compiling a language designed for an interpreter running on a 4.77 MHz 8088. But we've come this far, so why not? Likely approach: translate the token stream to C and lean on GCC/Clang for the heavy lifting.

Hardware I/O simulator — an optional emulation layer for OUT, INP, WAIT, MOTOR, and friends. The idea is to provide a virtual PC peripheral bus so retro programs that talk to the speaker, joystick port, or parallel interface can do something useful instead of silently no-oping. Think of it as a tiny museum exhibit for vintage BASIC hardware hacking.
BSAVE / BLOAD — binary file save/load for screen buffers and data
TUI color support — map GW-BASIC COLOR attributes to ANSI 16-color output in the TUI screen buffer
VIEW / WINDOW / PALETTE — graphics viewport, coordinate mapping, and palette remapping
MBF format support for binary LOAD — convert Microsoft Binary Format float constants when loading files saved by the original GWBASIC.EXE
Extended PEEK/POKE regions — keyboard shift flags (0040:0017), CGA graphics mode framebuffer mapping

Jupyter kernel for GW-BASIC — a Jupyter Notebook kernel that runs GW-BASIC programs cell-by-cell, with rich output for PRINT, inline graphics rendering for drawing commands, and interactive INPUT via notebook widgets. Similar in spirit to foxkernel.
JetBrains plugin (IntelliJ/CLion) — full-featured language plugin with syntax highlighting, code completion, line number navigation, run configurations, debugger integration (breakpoints via STOP, variable inspection), structure view (line number outline), and error annotations.
VS Code extension — language extension providing syntax highlighting (TextMate grammar), snippets, run/debug tasks, integrated terminal runner, and Language Server Protocol support for diagnostics and hover info.

Virtual memory emulation covers BIOS data area and CGA text buffer only; CGA graphics mode PEEK/POKE not yet mapped
Binary files use IEEE 754 floats, not MBF — files saved here are not byte-compatible with original GWBASIC.EXE binary format
String garbage collection not implemented (uses malloc/free instead)
Maximum 256 variables, 64 arrays, 16 FOR nesting, 24 GOSUB nesting, 16 WHILE nesting
Hardware I/O (OUT, INP, WAIT, COM, MOTOR) not yet implemented