Gambas is an object-oriented dialect of the BASIC programming language, and an integrated development environment that accompanies it.

[5] Designed to run on Linux and other Unix-like computer operating systems,[6] its name is a recursive acronym for Gambas Almost Means Basic.

Gambas is also the word for prawns in the Spanish, French, and Portuguese languages, from which the project's logos are derived.

It featured a major redesign of the interface, now with all forms and functions embedded in a single window, as well as some changes to the Gambas syntax, although for the most part code compatibility was kept.

[17] With Gambas, developers can also use databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, build KDE (Qt) and GNOME GTK applications with DCOP, translate Visual Basic programs to Gambas and run them under Linux, build network solutions, and create CGI web applications.

The IDE also includes a tool for the creation of installation packages, supporting GNU Autotools, slackpkg, pacman, RPM, and debs (the latter two then tailored for specific distributions such as Fedora/RHEL/CentOS, Mageia, Mandriva, OpenSUSE and Debian, Ubuntu/Mint).

Gambas is intended to provide a similar experience as developing in Microsoft Visual Basic, but it is not a free software clone of the popular proprietary program.

[42] It has since been discontinued following the launch of the first party Gambas Software Farm integrated into the IDE since 3.7.1, which contains nearly 500 applications and demos.

[45] Notable applications written in Gambas include Xt7-player-mpv, a GUI frontend for mpv player contained in a number of Linux software repositories,[46][47][48] and I-Nex, a program for displaying hardware data.

[55] [56] An independent contributor, François Gallo, also worked on porting Gambas 3.x to Mac OS X and FreeBSD, based on using local versions of the X11 system.

[59] In November 2013, the future portability of Gambas was discussed, listing the main concerns being Linux kernel features utilized in the interpreter, components using Linux specific software and libraries, and primarily X11-tying in the Qt, GTK and desktop integration components.

On October 27, 2016, a screenshot and setup guide was released from the main page for running Gambas fully through Cygwin, including most components, graphical toolkits, and the complete IDE.