I would honestly spend money to get access to the VB6 source if that's what it takes to get Microsoft to fund open sourcing it. One key thing was that VB6 was the first version that wasn't using P-Code but was actually compiling natively into an EXE.

I like to imagine that there was actually a VB7 in the works with a lot of enhancements to VB6 that we just never got to see once Microsoft dropped .NET and made VB .NET a thing.

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int_19h 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

VB5 was the first version with native .exe generation. Although P-code vs native didn't make as much of a difference as one might think because the generated code was really slow; not in the ballpark of Delphi even.

The amusing thing about native VB is that Win32 is still, to this day, carrying a bunch of APIs (Var*) that essentially encode its semantics on Variants, e.g.: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/oleauto/...

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WorldMaker 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The first VB.NET release was versioned VB7, every hint we have shows that the team at Microsoft felt they were building the next version of VB. Given VB6's deep reliance on OCX/ActiveX, .NET was seen as the future of that and the fix for a lot of the bugs and problems of OCX/ActiveX.

	▲	int_19h 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed, VB6 was essentially BASIC with OLE Automation object model bolted on. (Which itself was designed to a large extent to match what VB was doing before, so it's a bit circular). And let's not forget that .NET grew out of the "COM 2.0" project. Which started in 1998, at the same time VB6 was released.