Granted, the platform surrounding VB6 arguably had too much hairy logic related to COM and ActiveX, and the fragile system that existed for registering such components before Windows XP introduced side-by-side assemblies. If you really want to pine for the old days, consider Delphi, where you could compile everything into one executable; just map that hunk of code into memory and go.
http://chadaustin.me/2009/02/logic-vs-array-processing/
Granted, the platform surrounding VB6 arguably had too much hairy logic related to COM and ActiveX, and the fragile system that existed for registering such components before Windows XP introduced side-by-side assemblies. If you really want to pine for the old days, consider Delphi, where you could compile everything into one executable; just map that hunk of code into memory and go.