As cited on the website, the first PureBasic user (who registered in 1998) still has free access to new updates and this is not going to change.

[5] The following single line of PureBasic code will create a standalone x86 executable (4.5 KiB (4,608 bytes) on Windows version) that displays a message box with the text "Hello World".

PureBasic is a "Second generation BASIC" language, with structured conditionals and loops, and procedure-oriented programming supported.

The user is not required to use procedures, so a programmer may opt for a coding style which includes Goto, Gosub Label, and Return.

There is a set of basic types - .f, .d (float and double numbers), .b, .c, .w, .l, .q (integers - from single-byte and 8-byte), .s - strings.

In addition to basic types, the user can define the type of construction via Variables can be single (actually, standard variables), dynamic array (declared using the Dim var_name.type_name (size1, size2, ... ), a linked list (List() var_name.type_name), an associative array (in new versions of language) (Map var_name.type_name()) PureBasic has its own form designer to aid in the creation of forms for applications, but other third-party solutions are also available.

On 17 february 2025 the English language forum had 6,484 members and contained 70,174 threads comprising 578,646 posts since 17 May 2002.