Simba/Doc/sphinx/whysimba.rst

.. _whysimba:

Why Simba?
==========

So why would you use Simba?

For several reasons. Number one is probably the active community combined with
the open mindedness of the Simba developers.

Simba is:

Free
~~~~

Simba is, and always will be free. 
It is free as in Free Beer ``and`` as in Freedom.

Simba is 100% free to use. In fact, we welcome you to share it with the 
rest of the world.

The source code to the program is also freely available, under the GPL
license. 

.. note:: 
      The source code allows everyone to see how the program actually
      works. Most developers choose not to share their source code and therefore
      decide to hold knowledge back. The Simba developers highly disagree with
      this mentality and will fight for a world with free knowledge for
      everyone. "Closed Source" as not sharing source code is called, is holding
      back innovation and research in the world.


Extensible
~~~~~~~~~~

Simba supports both plugins in machine code as well as extensions written
in the Simba programming language. (Pascal)

This way one can easily extend Simba. See :ref:`writing-simba-extensions`

Reliable
~~~~~~~~

Simba is actively maintained by a team of knowledgable programmers. 

We as a team do our best to make Simba into a quality product. 
However this does not guarantee a bug free program.
(Bug free programs don't exist)

Should you encouter a bug, please consider sending a bug report so we can
resolve the issue: :ref:`bugreport`.

Cross Platform
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Simba has been written with freedom in mind and believes Simba 
should not be limited to one platform, as that limits its users
to one platform as well.

Currently the supported platforms are Windows and Linux.

Even though we try hard to make Simba bug-free on all platforms,
some issues remain. The biggest issue is the component that 
executes your program. It is an external component and does not
play too well on Linux. Hopefully we will be able to fix this soon.

Fast
~~~~

The Simba developers have designed and written Simba with speed in mind.
However, focussing too much on speed is in reality not a good case.
It often leads to instability and more bugs in the program.
For Simba, we have sacrificed some speed to make a more featureful
and stable program.

Nevertheless, Simba is quite fast.