Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived

hckrnws

Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived

485

270

by boredjohnny

Visual FoxPro stopped at version 9 in 2007. A surprising amount of it is still running, in 32 bits, because rewriting a 20-year-old business app is how you lose the business. A customer wanted to keep milking their app for the foreseeable future, so here it is: the same language on a new runtime (Rust, compiled to wasm, checked against the real vfp9.exe), tables no longer stopped at 2 GB, the old 32-bit .fll add-ins still loading, and lambdas, JSON and an HTTP server bolted on for good measure. Reports are not done and the builds are unsigned. MIT because why not?

ksec
233d
I know there are still a few niche industry that has an industry standard program written in Visual FoxPro, and I remember as pre COVID 2019 they were still using it. ( Edit: I just called and asked, still using it as of 2026 )
Niche but no small business, commodity with over $400M USD annual revenue, the industry together that is easily $2B+.
If it is not broke, don't fix it. And there are industry that is extremely conservative in anything software, they will just keep it running for as long as they could.
I used to be sad that we don't have something better to replace these antique software. Now I have come to appreciate it, mostly because newer software haven't show they have manage to add value in the slightest. And most of the time they simply don't work as well.
Delphi, Visual FoxPro, Visual Basic, Flash. I used to think one day we will have something that is not only faster, easier and scalable replacement of those. Instead everything went more technical, more complex, enterprisy and non-user friendly.
And to the Author of the project. Thank You for making it.
1. jasode
  43d
  >, Visual FoxPro, Visual Basic, Flash. I used to think one day we will have something that is not only faster, easier and scalable replacement of those.
  A person's perspective on the older dev tools being "superior" to today's newer tools depends on the things they want to build.
  I had jobs working on Foxbase/FoxPro for DOS and migrated those apps to FoxPro for Windows, and Visual Basic 3.0 to 6.0 ... and I don't look back at those with the same positive nostalgia.
  Classic VB was "simple" but every project at each company had a different hodge podge of 3rd-party VBX/OCX add-on controls to do anything non-trivial. E.g. 3rd-party calendar date picker, report writer, etc. VB didn't have a decent datagrid so everybody bought a 3rd-party one. In contrast, C# WinForms standard controls included a usable datagrid with data binding out of the box.
  In a FoxPro for Windows project I was working on, we needed to open .zip files. FoxPro didn't have that functionality so the company paid an extra $300 for the FoxPro Library Construction Kit[1] and I hand-coded a .zip file parser in C Language to be called by FoxPro code. Instead of FoxPro dev work being simple, it's complex! Today's Python or C# can trivially open .zip files with builtin modules and functions so devs don't waste time on writing low-level C code or use 3rd-party libs.
  With old 1990s tools, you can't do "simple" tasks such as getting a UTC timestamp, use a regex expression, or retrieve a web page with an http call, etc without calling Win32 API functions or 3rd-party tools.
  If one wants to do things beyond the limitations of classic VB/FoxPro, the newer dev tools like Python/C# etc absolutely do make things easier and faster.
  [1] https://www.scribd.com/document/384159949/Ms-Foxpro-Develope...
  1. rafterydj
    13d
    This is only tangentially related but I often wonder about the nature of software and whether we made a mistake "standardizing" as much as we have.
    I say this not because you're wrong - I'm sure that using built-in modules for .zip parsing is faster and easier! - but rather because I don't know whether or not it's worth knowing how to do that. In the AI days right now there's argument being had about whether learning any coding at all is valuable. My gut says it is, but I've also spent years learning before AI, so maybe it's a sunk cost fallacy.
    Regardless, my feeling is that we haven't found the balance between what's worth making every programmer learn/implement themselves, and what's worth abstracting away. Maybe implementing a .zip parser gives you some kind of secret wisdom that makes your future work better?
    jasomill
    03d
2. andsoitis
  13d
  > Delphi
  Delphi is alive. https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi
  1. cestith
    02d
    Often FreePascal with Lazarus is a suitable alternative, and it's also very much alive.
3. pvitz
  33d
  A big software for simulating the economic balance sheets of life insurance companies moved many years ago from using FoxPro under the hood to CSV files and sold it as a huge improvement. I don't think anybody was convinced by that, but vendor lock-in makes companies accept such regressions.
  1. cube00
    13d
    I was on a project trying to migrate off Oracle and they wanted to just dump all historic data to CSVs.
    I pointed out they'd lose a lot of the integrity and audit features built into a database.
    I get wanting to be free from Oracle but go to another database.
4. amai
  43d
  > Delphi, Visual FoxPro, Visual Basic, Flash
  All these tools are nice for a single developer. But they fail to scale for teams where you want a distributed version system, automated tests and CI/CD pipelines. Also you want to reuse code via package management systems. And a single code base for several target systems (cross compilation , electron) is also nice. I believe the mentioned tools offer none of this.
  1. regularfry
    13d
    > But they fail to scale for teams where you want a distributed version system, automated tests and CI/CD pipelines.
    I don't think this is true? Certainly you could have done those things with Delphi but it pre-dated DVCS and CI/CD being common concerns.
    > Also you want to reuse code via package management systems.
    Again, these tools pre-dated package management systems being in common use because they pre-date internet access at any sort of bandwidth being a reliable assumption. No reason they couldn't have one. Perl did at the time, which I mainly put down to it being in common use where internet access was a reliable assumption, but very little else did.
    > And a single code base for several target systems (cross compilation , electron) is also nice
    You can absolutely do this with Lazarus, which picked up where Delphi left off. Flash also counts here.
5. boredjohnny • OP
  03d
  That is the same experience that I had with manufacturing shops, they just keep using the tool if it works.
  > And to the Author of the project. Thank You for making it. My pleasure
6. stronglikedan
  01d
  > And there are industry that is extremely conservative in anything software
  Honestly, that's at least 90% of non-tech industry, and there's a good living to be made as a consultant that can support legacy software.
7. esseph
  33d
  > Niche but no small business, commodity with over $400M USD annual revenue, the industry together that is easily $2B+.
  This feels so small in 2026.
  1. cestith
    22d
    It feels small to some people in 2026, depending on the business type and the field. Most businesses are small businesses, though. It actually approaches 100%. This is under the SBA's definition as of not long ago. There are limits on earnings, number of employees, or both for what can even be considered a "small business" that vary by industry. They are as low as $9 million revenue or 100 employees, although some industries have much higher ceilings. https://legacy.sba.gov/sites/default/files/2023-06/Table%20o...
    The average annual revenue of a small business in the US in 2026 is around $1.2 million. The average headcount is about 11 people. About 46% of employees in the US are employed by small businesses. In 2024, about 64% of new jobs were created by small businesses. About 61% of new jobs from 1991 to 2025 were created in small businesses.
    https://entrepreneurshq.com/small-business-statistics/
    https://www.forafinancial.com/blog/small-business/average-sm...
    https://www.venasolutions.com/blog/small-business-revenue-st...
8. etcetcetcetceta
  03d
  I haven't used Delphi since I was a child.
mikestew
403d
Here’s my problem with reviving FoxPro in any form: there’s a huge security hole in the Database Container (DBC) design. For DBCs to be useful, they must be read/write to all users (there is no permissions scheme). DBCs have stored procedures that can run any FoxPro code, including Win32 calls made from the FoxPro runtime. The stored procedures are stored as plain text in a “memo” field. Do you see where this is going? With a little technical knowledge, one can modify that INSERT trigger to whatever you like. EDIT: as the DB is just files in the file system, modifications can be made using a text editor, bypassing any checks in the FoxPro runtime. FoxPro just executes what it finds in there.
My recommendation is to get rid of the DBF/DBC files and move to a SQL DB of some flavor ASAP. If you have the source code, use ODBC or OLE DB to point to a server.
Source: filed that bug over 20 years ago when I worked on the Fox team. No, it wasn’t going to get fixed without rewriting large parts of how the DB engine worked.
1. EvanAnderson
  3
progmetaldev
83d
I worked with a physician's office in 2006, and the lead physician had cobbled together a system for patient tracking using Visual FoxPro. It was a monstrosity, and using it over a network drive gave all sorts of file locks and issues with multiple people changing the same record (usually the physician and front of house staff when checking the patient out).
I finally got the physician to switch to a proper client/server architecture using .NET WinForms and ASP.NET RPC calls. All issues went away, and I was even able to allow staff members to edit the interface to set what mattered to them most at the top of the application, by building the lab testing form in XML so they could move the X/Y coordinates to where they wanted them. It wasn't even a feature I had thought of, just a physician looking through the technology and figuring out how it worked (luckily the business and security logic were on the server, so a bad actor could only have destroyed their own local copy of the app).
1. nradov
  2
networkOne
13d
My goodness, a blast from the past. Such a glorious time to be a programmer... every single business needed a database to do their simple little daily chores, the coding was insanely easy (just a bunch of CRUD process), and the difference it made to the customers was night/day... hence, you could charge thru the roof.
I wrote a simple little CRUD app in FoxPro, for the Canadian real estate appraisal market, which took about a part-time month to create, and first year, sold 300 licenses at $299 a pop.
Ahh, memories of a simpler time.
1. realty_geek
  03d
neilv
03d
Flashback. When I was an adolescent, the dBase and Fox products were my first paid software development, and they were surprisingly accessible to even kids.
I was only supposed to help assemble computer furniture, and maybe install networked Unix and PC software, but the retired Marine my mom worked for thought I had potential. "Hey, Kid", he would say, we need to modify this dBase vehicle fleet insurance database to support more vehicles; figure it out. Here's the manuals for C database library, and Microsoft C, I'm evaluating; figure it out. We need to migrate between accounting systems; here's a sample .DBF of the target schema, here's how you generate a full dump from the legacy minicomputer, use this editor called Emacs to clean up the dump for import, once you figure out the schema mapping; figure it out. I also bought an older dBase product, and then a Fox product, for home, and figured out how to build a few fancier systems.
(Then I kept working, and there was a period when all employers either wanted me to figure out something, or were favorably surprised when I soon did, thanks to formative influences of figure-it-out mentors. Then a break to get belated formal degrees, then being surprised after that pause, when job interviews were suddenly Leetcode-like, and they didn't seem to want me to figure it out, but wanted a rehearsed ritual performance conforming to a big-corporate sanctioned set of rules, and apparently the Marine hadn't written a book to counterbalance that awful green book. :) )
EvanAnderson
63d
The low barrier to entry, high developer productivity, and bespoke and "highly conforming to proprietary business processes" nature of resulting applications are all really cool, but man, it sucks when one of these systems outgrows the capabilities of the underlying platform.
I shudder at the though of businesses trying to access DBF files on "network drives" across the variety of shitty overlay network technologies that are the norm today. Seamless remote access to applications is the exact recipe Visual FoxPro apps fail at.
It looks cool but I wouldn't want actually work around apps built in it. It would be cool if a client/server database could be transparently shoehorned in to it.
1. pasc1878
  23d
kstrauser
03d
Hey, I got to mention this recently! One of my bizarre claims to fame was writing this little tool[0] a few employers back to convert Visual FoxPro database files to PostgreSQL as part of a migration. For a while we had to run it as a cron job so that people could to data entry in an old VFP app but others could run fast reports on our web app with a postgres backend. It wasn't pretty, but it worked great and helped us get off that ancient stack.
[0]https://github.com/kstrauser/pgdbf
rayiner
53d
> Visual FoxPro is a 32-bit program, and that decides more than it appears to.
Has anyone studied what in the models causes this sentence structure? Is it some consequence of the architecture that leads it to blurt out a fact and then only later the significance of that fact?
1. lloydatkinson
  03d
  Not sure but I'm getting really sad reading anything and seeing this AI speak everywhere.
NoelJacob
23d
Please stop using AI to write it gives a headache. Just go with simple 2 line sentences you can write on your own or even dictacte it if youre lazy.
1. probably_wrong
  03d
  Perhaps this is a good use case for AI? I'm sure it's trivial to write an AI system that reads AI text and replaces AI-generated text with AI-generated, non-AI-looking text.
  AI.
wila
23d
There's been a 64 bit version of FoxPro for years and years [1].
No, not the official VFP as released by Microsoft, but a version made by a well known VFP developer.
Besides that I do know of some developers actually using this for building their software.
No connections here, just know that it exists and is used and well before LLMs became the answer to everything.
[1] https://www.baiyujia.com/vfpadvanced/f_vfpa_about.asp
1. boredjohnny • OP
  13d
autoexec
23d
Microsoft might have killed FoxPro but even in windows 11 they still have the icon for it in moricons.dll where it will live presumably forever in every version of windows Microsoft ever releases.
1. EvanAnderson
  03d
  My daughter loves foxes. When I made a desktop shortcut to allow her to easily hibernate her school laptop I knew right where to go to get an icon she'd like.
percentcer
12d
"The IDE, on Visual FoxPro's own sample projects. Every picture is a real session." starting to have involuntary revulsive twitches from Claude prose
1. palmotea
  02d
  > "The IDE, on Visual FoxPro's own sample projects. Every picture is a real session." starting to have involuntary revulsive twitches from Claude prose
  It's beautiful, isn't it?
meerita
23d
My father built several projects in FoxPro. I was too young in the ’90s to remember much of it, but I’m sure he’ll be super happy to check this out. The kicker is that we’ll probably need to buy a floppy disk drive and dust off some old boxes to find them.
1. outworlder
  13d
  They are unlikely to still work.
  If they do, immediately copy the data over. They tend to crumble and fall apart (and contaminate the drive head, which will need cleaning)
moron4hire
03d
Why does every AI written project website make it sound like it's going to kill all your enemies for you and get you all "the bitches"? This is true power. Unforseen by human eyes thus far. Your manager will tremble in fear.
jermaustin1
03d
My first real job was 2006, turning a Visual FoxPro application into a Web Application using ASP.Net 1.1 Web Forms and VB.Net.
With that said, I've never actually used FoxPro. I only had a database as the contract for what my web app was supposed to do.
pi-victor
03d
Great job with this project, I bet there are VFP apps still running or even DOS FP apps.
This takes me back to the first commercial software i ever worked on around 19 years ago, it was an accounting software written in Visual FoxPro. It's a super easy language to get started with programming and the fact that you can drag your widgets on the screen helps a lot. I remember using hungarian notations too. In hindsight that's both good and bad, because the moment you move to another language that doesn't offer an IDE where you can drag widgets with your mouse on the screen to position them and you have to work with containers, programmatically, you quickly realize how little you really know about creating UIs with forms. I don't think i had an opinion back then if VFP was good or bad but I remember the IDE would crash when you tried to build your project sometimes with a pop-up that would say "Catastrophic failure!". I always thought that was super funny and to this day i still have the screenshot. I think about a year or so before they killed it, they releases SP2 which was a bit more stable.
jordand
433d
All these years later, Microsoft Access is still alive and kicking, and just three years ago, the 32bit version got Large Address Aware (LAA) support! Technically my very first software job was writing VBA in Microsoft Access for a few weeks and they're probably still running it (there's no drop in replacement for it or cheap way to migrate away)
1. post-it
  423d
  Access is so good. I can't believe there's no universal equivalent for Linux and Mac. There are dozens of times when I've used a spreadsheet when a file-based database would have been better.
ang_cire
03d
I loved visual fox pro as a kid (~10). I made little UIs to open my favorite sites and files.
opengrass
13d
>1 commit 2 hours ago
>domain registered 7 hours ago
>ghost pusher named Dev
1. mdmower
  02d
  Pretty sure all the upvotes came from folks nostalgic about FoxPro development days. I don't think anyone is actually upvoting the quality of the seemingly fully AI written website, documentation, and application.
rufugee
93d
We run 500 KLOC of FoxPro at my company, daily. It is the engine that fuels a $500M business.
I hate that it's the hand I'm dealt, but aside from AI rewrites (underway), there's no good answer. It's complicated by our reliance on DBFs.
I welcome efforts like foxscript and anything else in this space. There are still a significant number of FoxPro apps out there and no one has a good answer. If you are struggling in this space, leave a comment here. I'll reach out to you. Strength in numbers...
1. boredjohnny • OP
  33d
giancarlostoro
02d
I have been working on a VB6 recreation starting with the IDE. Eventually I want to build the compiler and runtime, but for now being able to open existing projects, load all the images and do all the syntax highlighting is a good first step.
I know TwinBasic exists but its closed source and I want to take things further than VB6 ever did. I always felt like VB7 could have been something amazing if it kept going outside of .NET but they let it go and basically killed a really rich language by breaking all sane compatibility.
Maybe worth me putting support for this project, and I too intend to license my efforts under the MIT license. ;)
Kuyawa
03d
Oh nostalgia, dbase, clipper, clarion, foxbase, delphi, I loved VFP so much, not for the language but for the tools, the screen designer, the db browser, the sql queries, all that power and user love was dumped in the trash can for the travesti that was .net at the time
I learned VB.net, C# and even F# to see if they surpassed in any sense my beloved VFP but no, I felt so betrayed I decided to migrate to a galaxy far far away and never look back, 25 years ago (a time where exes and single user apps where the norm for my clients, then came multiuser and external db storage, then the web took over)
This looks promising, I'll give it a try. If I asked AI to fork it, I'd change the language to modernize it a bit (uppercase now looks like cobol written on a punch card)
Edit: On a second thought, I'd fork it in Swift (with the help of AI of course) and use it in MacOS for single user desktop apps. It would serve a single purpose much better than xCode does
movedx
03d
I miss the VB6 days. Simpler days with worse options than what we have today, but being able to drag a button onto a canvas, double click it, wrote the code behind it, and then build to an executable was lovely. I wish I could do that today with macOS but everything is so complicated these days. AI helping.
whalesalad
63d
So hard to take these vibe coded projects seriously. I can feel the LLM selling it to me. I don't want to suggest the code is bad or it doesn't work or doesn't have awesome features... but ai built landers are just so smelly.
1. ravenstine
  03d
  Without fail, these vibe coded project websites all make themselves look way more ambitious and established than they actually are. A software project could be hours old and it will have a website that, just a handful of years ago, only projects that had been around for a while and with a revenue model would have had. To me, it comes off as so overly persuasive that the only thing I can think nowadays is "what sort of half-baked junk are they trying to sell me?" Today, a primitive website or a mere handwritten README.md is, ironically, a more reliable signal of whether an application is worth considering. At least to me, anyway.
Suppafly
01d
My godfather that helped me get into computers used to make a decent living doing foxpro databases for companies in the 90s. We lost touch years ago, I always wondered if he stuck with it.
tombert
63d
I might literally be the only person on earth that can honestly say I have been paid to write FoxPro, Erlang, F#, and ColdFusion.
My first software job was at a Tae Kwan Do studio who ran their own billing department, and the entire billing half was some weird custom thing written with FoxPro. Not Visual FoxPro, I've never actually used that, but the old school DOS stuff.
I absolutely hated every time I had to touch it and I had hoped that it would die in a fire. I hope Visual FoxPro sucks less.
1. jhbadger
  23d
torginus
03d
I haven't used FoxPro but I have had plenty of exposure to tech with a similar 'feel' - Excel and Word documents scripted to the gills with VBA, eventually C#, and mutating into new and kinds of horrors.
It always starts simple - you wanna build just a simple CRUD where the entry is a form that goes into the table.
Then the complexity grows, and your table has to reach out to other services, call APIs etc. etc.
The 'convenient' primitives, that did 90% of the things that need doing can't do the last 10% - so you drop down to VB, which is exactly like regular programs but worse. It also doesn't interact well with the rest of the system, so you have to rewrite adjacent stuff in VB too.
cm2187
13d
Can LLM access FoxPro programmatically, or is the file format easily parsable? Most of FoxPro apps are likely fairly simple CRUD apps. It would be trivial for a modern AI to transcode it to a web based client server solution.
1. jasomill
  02d
  DBF is a straightforward and widely implemented file format, so I assume LLMs would have little trouble extracting raw data. No idea about programmatic access, but I assume the answer is yes.
vondur
12d
My father in law did database programming for small businesses using FoxPro. It was pretty cool, it created the executable and you could host it on any Windows file server IIRC. I think it also may have had some server functionality built in too. Anyways, it was fast if the database was designed correctly and allowed for easy setup at the clients offices. I think before that he was using a product called Clipper.
1. nobleach
  02d
  Yup, same story for me. Father-in-law owned a consulting business on the side. (CS Professor was his day job) His apps were CA Clipper, DB3, VB4-6, FoxPro, Turbo Pascal, Delphi. I worked for him for years in college. Doctors offices, dentist offices and an oil company. What a time to be in the programming gig! I migrated Novell servers and moved customers from Btrieve to PervasiveSQL. We got into open source pretty early (1998 - which one might argue wasn't THAT early). Some of our "next-gen" stuff used Perl:DBI, Python + MySQL, PHP3. I got such a crash course in cool tech.
  The one thing I learned early on. MS-JET is NOT something you want to share from a server! Dbase dbf on the other hand, seemed to work fine.
MomsAVoxell
23d
It occurred to me recently that with AI/ML, we can basically keep any and all software going, no matter if its original authors retire it .. its getting to the point where an AI can reliably parse the bytes and apply whatever ABI is defined for the platform, and then .. add features, fix bugs, and so on.
Are we witnessing the end of the age of source code? In many ways, the signs are on the horizon that we are.
1. TMWNN
  12d
  Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human society thousands of years in the future, in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://web.archive.org/web/20231114211656/http://www.gareth...>
  (Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It began as a physical machine a quarter century ago.)
[deleted]
02d
[deleted]
jasomill
02d
My first ever "paid" consulting job was building a dBASE application.
"Paid" in quotes because I was about 10 years old at the time and the work was done for my mother in her capacity as a government employee. What she could do, though, was find a surplus shrinkwrapped copy of dBASE III Plus that I was allowed to keep when I was done.
smackeyacky
23d
I feel like the business apps are an easier rewrite these days rather than imperfectly recreating the runtime environment.
Now your customer has two problems instead of just one.
1. SequoiaHope
  13d
  Ya so you can bill twice! Once to do it the way the customer wants and a second time to do it right once they realize their mistake.
brookfinch61028
02d
Didn't expect an AppImage and a .deb in the downloads. How much of an app survives on Linux, though? Plenty of VFP code drives Excel through CREATEOBJECT, and the .fll bridge is a 32-bit Windows process. What happens to those calls there?
tomcam
02d
The home page for Foxscript is perfect IMHO. Loads fast, well written, easy to understand, looks great.
chupchap
03d
OMG what a blast from the past. We were taught FoxPro in school in 2002 for some reason. Not even Visual FoxPro, the old school DOS version. It taught me a lot about scripting and I remember helping out a medical rep who had built a FoxPro app to manage his business while in college.
mamcx
33d
The main kick is that there is not a way to "rewrite" a foxpro app without tons of stuff along the way!
(Example: You can ship an app that internally run `CREATE REPORT` and the report builder show up. You can invoke the debugger (that as I remember is the best I used a zero alternatives as good existed)) and so on
1. mikestew
  23d
  The runtime didn’t contain the debugger or other dev tools, only the dev version/IDE did. It did contain the report writer, though.
yread
03d
I have learnt programming watching my mom code in foxpro (using el editor) in the early 90s. I would sometimes correct her missing parantheses haha. She made all UI out of box drawing characters, unbelievable amount of work compared to today.
BatchJob
02d
While these tools were useful for their time, I agree with most of the sentiment that some genies are best left in the bottle.
Also, I would beware of getting MS lawyers on your tail.
pjmlp
03d
Ah the xBASE languages, I was a big fan of them and Clipper 5 helped a couple of side gigs during school years.
Never got to use FoxPro though, but followed along in magazine articles and such, great to see this kind of tech going on.
devy
13d
This is awesome! Having had to deal with ancient file formats knowing that there are renewed tooling that's not binding to legacy OSes that you can't no longer find viably is great.
Now, who's open sourcing and reviving FileMaker that Apple killed?
1. daotoad
  03d
  Apple still sells Filemaker.
  https://www.claris.com/filemaker/
ndiddy
13d
What issues were your customer running into that made a 64-bit FoxPro necessary? What makes you more confident in rewriting the entire runtime the app runs inside of than rewriting the app itself? That seems just as risky if not more.
1. boredjohnny • OP
  03d
  bigger tables (2 GB cap) and no source code changes.
tonymet
02d
what a great idea, and has the potential to pull $10m in a year or so. engineers everywhere should be pursuing these projects. So many businesses are running on "legacy" platforms. Glance over the costco customer service desk , they're still using some cobol dos inventory system.
Clone it with cheaper tools, and win the next $100m / yr contract from costco at half the price. There are 100k opportunities out there right now.
Hasz
03d
haha, I used this exact example in sales calls to make the case against app modernization. Sometimes, you just need the stuff to keep working, with $20-and-a-roll-of-duct-tape-level budgets.
My proposal was proxy layer sitting in between, running on something like k8s and written mostly by an LLM to provide a safe interface to queries against foxpro, with ratelimiting, query parsing, rest, whatever other business logic you want.
I am appalled at the fact it's still out there, but there is even older, more Archean stuff out there running literally the entire world :)
bovermyer
03d
Good lord. I remember having to convert Visual FoxPro "programs" to PHP+MySQL way back in 2011. That was actually a lot of fun.
This is fascinating. The author did great work here.
pstuart
13d
I learned SQL with FoxPro on the Mac in the 90s. It was a great app.
1. dwd
  03d
  Same, but not a Mac.
  The lecturer had a side business building FoxPro apps for local businesses, and really pushed us with real-world style SQL puzzles.
  Built an app to track my MtG cards at the time. (this was pre-Web)
sehugg
13d
Clarion and Paradox thought one of them was going to win the tontine.
1. TMWNN
  03d
  R:BASE is still around
markus_zhang
13d
Our high school taught FOXBASE and I immediately fell for it. I didn’t make anything real with it, though, but it was my first official language and I dreamed big back then.
1. timbit42
  01d
  This reminds me of when I used to think it would be cool to rewrite Empire in COBOL.
oezi
02d
Neat! I tried to do the same for Filemaker Pro 10 (with Fable). Bit couldn't push it beyond 50% functionality.
nrawe
03d
A company I worked for has run VFP up until the last few years. I cut my teeth professionally with it on ETL processes. It moved data around like nobodies business!
SequoiaHope
03d
That’s great! Nice work thanks for sharing. I’ve never heard of FoxPro but I’ve seen how businesses need some app for 30+ years. Cool to see this happen.
rpmisms
03d
Ugh. My first job was rewriting foxpro. Bad memories.
karim79
03d
Goddamn this brought me back to my childhood with FoxPro books on my dad's bookshelf when I was a child. Thanks for that, necromancer.
quietlathe
03d
Someone really missed those `.dbf` files. Curious if the report writer is still a nightmare or a nostalgic dream.
zerr
33d
For vibe coded open-source projects, I believe the prompt session/history should be shared as well.
1. _flux
  23d
  What kind of use do you expect to get from them? Evaluate the amount human effort of the project?
SuperHeavy256
02d
I would absolutely love to interact with a demo program made using this FoxPro.
finn888
03d
Wow, FoxPro! Used to build some gnarly inventory systems with that. Good to see it kicking.
fdgwhite
03d
Any love for Borland’s Paradox?
[deleted]
03d
[deleted]
zergrush
73d
what was foxpro , for younger gen here
1. xattt
  03d
  It was boxed software that, when going to a computer/office store as a child in the mid-1990s, you wanted your parents to buy because it had a fox on the cover and in the name without actually knowing what it did.
  Simply speaking from experience.
raphinou
43d
Just mentioning because you explicitly said builds are unsigned: I'm working on a (open source) signing solution supporting GitHub releases that is easy to use for both signers and downloaders. Let me know if this would interest you (not immediately putting link to avoid spamming).
1. lima
  12d
  What's wrong with the Sigstore ecosystem? Why reinvent this wheel in particular?
password4321
13d
This is great! Next up: VB6
1. imojenisys
  02d
  [dead]
ingen0s
03d
Very nice one of my favorite revivals ever. Kudos.
[deleted]
03d
[deleted]
[deleted]
03d
[deleted]
Pannoniae
53d
Great job! 32-to-64-bit conversions are always fun :) One question though. If this is intended for desktop, why bother with WASM at all? Do you gain anything other than less performance?
1. boredjohnny • OP
  03d
  Funny enough the customer is one of my dads friends that has been running the same shop for 20 years, wanted bigger tables and keep milking that for the foreseable future. I wanted something simple, no jit stuff, no gc complexity. Just a stack based interpreter. Yes it was LLM assisted like most stuff nowadays.
zerr
02d
Since vibe-coding solved the issue of manpower, why stick to Electron and js frameworks?
jordemort
03d
must have been a rich customer!
peter_d_sherman
03d
Microsoft should open-source FoxPro, at least some version of it, because as of 2026, it has no commercial viability (no ability for it to make the company money) compared to say SQL Server, Access and/or Visual Basic with the appropriate back-end database drivers. If Visual FoxPro V9 (2007) is too late because there are unexpired patents or other issues, then Microsoft should open-source an earlier version.
Even open-sourcing FoxPro 2.6a for DOS (the last DOS version, August 1994, > 30 years ago) would be better than open-sourcing no FoxPro version.
Fundamentally, FoxPro, at its core, is 4 things:
1) It's own low-level database engine
2) It's own SQL parser/interpreter/engine sitting on top of #1.
3) Simple (but very data-aware of the underlying data!) scripting language (based on dBase, referred to as "xBase" -- or more specifically the FoxPro dialect of xBase) sitting on top of #1 (except for the SQL commands, SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, etc., which sit on top of #2)
4) Form / GUI / Data-entry and Data-search Form Designers that exist on top of #1, #2 and #3. Basically a primitive (although very functional and elegantly simple) windowed App building environment.
Now, all of those 4 things could be replaced and/or outsourced to other open-source projects...
For example, to read/write/index/seek in FoxPro database files (the low-level database engine):
https://github.com/MPSystemsServices/CodeBase-for-DBF
I'm not sure if CodeBase comes with its own SQL engine/parser -- but if not, SQLite has a pretty good one which could probably be used with some modifications. If not, ANTLR has various SQL grammars for it floating around on the net (here's a quick blog post of someone using ANTLR to create a query language: https://markandrewperry.medium.com/using-antlr-to-create-a-q...)
For the scripting language, any scripting language could potentially work, but special attention should be paid to the way FoxPro variables are aware of data in underlying open tables in the current work area (SCATTER and GATHER commands and how they work, etc.), which is one of the unique features of FoxPro. (Also, for command / line / expression evaluation, you'd probably want to use or at least know about Dijkstra's Shunting Yard Algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunting_yard_algorithm)
For the GUI / Form designers, well, any data-aware form-designing graphical toolkit could work, but of course, FoxPro has/had its own nuanced "flavor" of these.
Generically speaking, FoxPro is/was a database engine, SQL engine, very-data-aware scripting language and form/gui/app designer -- all rolled into one package.
I'd love to see an app where all of these components are open source, where there are clear interfaces between those components (separate compilation options for codebases, depending on which components you want), where the original FoxPro/dBase/xBase scripting language is used (because it was great!) and where any underlying database engine and/or SQL engine could be "swapped out" for any other (i.e., SQLite, Postgres, etc.)
Anyway, FoxDevStudio looks interesting in this space!
nojvek
02d
I legit hate reading AI slop speak.
It's so annoying now. It's like everyone spamming each other with AI slop.
[deleted]
03d
[deleted]
_s_a_m_
03d
Hahahah this is too funny 8)
I wished almost it was terminal based
itomato
23d
Cool - now do Lotus Approach
1. JSR_FDED
  13d
  Why stop there? What the world truly needs is a vibe-coded Lotus Notes!
Grimeton
03d
Ah yes, yet another reason not to bury the dead.
[deleted]
03d
[deleted]
zero_shift
143d
Give the fact this project sprung out of nowhere an hour ago, has one commit and no obvious history beyond that - I must ask, was this vibe-coded?
1. silveira
  13d
  The website at least. Just look for the word "not". LLMs love writing things like "it's not ice cream, is pasta", "you get a full dog, not a cat".
ivo_repair_desk
03d
[dead]
mosscopper20773
02d
[dead]
signalfern39612
02d
[dead]
tideheron55419
02d
[dead]
stonechat12045
02d
[dead]
cinderwren88104
02d
[dead]
sriramraja251
03d
[dead]
jamesforestwest
03d
[dead]
chalesblack00
03d
[dead]
EtienneDeLyon
02d
[dead]
VCFundedGenYer
03d
[dead]
[deleted]
03d
[deleted]