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

Posted by boredjohnny 7 hours ago

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?

Comments

Comment by ksec 2 minutes ago

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 than 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.

Comment by mikestew 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by EvanAnderson 5 hours ago

One of the Ohio Secretary of State's "certified" (wrong terminology, but you get the idea) voter registration databases used by various county Boards of Elections is written in VFP. The software maintains the list of voters, their addresses, and scans of signatures.

Recently it had TOTP 'MFA' added to comply with a Secretary of State mandate.

Anyone who uses the software can just open the database files directly. They're just DBF files in a shared folder on a file server. All the users have to have read/write access to the files or the application won't work.

I hang my head.

Comment by marcus9999 2 hours ago

seen this exact pattern in small business FoxPro setups too, DBFs on a share are one dropped SMB connection away from a corrupted index. if you're stuck maintaining something like this the least bad move is nightly copies of the whole folder to a second box, and actually opening that copy in the app now and then instead of just checking that the file sizes match.

Comment by merb 16 minutes ago

Actually you can use foxpro with mssql and ole, you could than even add row level security for even more security

Comment by chasil 3 hours ago

Many of the complaints you make apply to SQLite as well?

I don't know if dBASE variants support bind variables. That isolation is really required to avoid the "Bobby Tables" effect.

https://bobby-tables.com/

I'd prefer to see the dBASE language adapted to run on SQLite files, as they are a far more profound standard.

Comment by userbinator 4 hours ago

there is no permissions scheme

If you already have full access by design, then there's no "huge security hole" either.

Comment by EvanAnderson 4 hours ago

Exactly. It's not a security hole. It's just the architecture of the program.

It seems like many people have a hard time understanding this, including developers.

Any attempt to add any kind of permissions, security, etc, without addressing the nature of the architecture (that the database engine runs in the same address space / security context as the UI) misses the point.

Comment by shermantanktop 1 hour ago

You’re saying it’s not a 2 tier client/server app, it’s a one tier app with no intermediate API to define or enforce permissions. Fine.

But the filesystem access to read/write the db files creates a path to bypass half of that application.

Does the application checksum the db file and have any resistance to filesystem tampering? That'd be trivial to beat, I’m sure, but it’d be something.

Comment by aforwardslash 54 minutes ago

Well, on a different note, if you have a scripted language application, you typically can edit files and bypass whatever you want on the application. In fact, I'd bet most modern software isn't signed; and even if it is, sometimes the libraries that get compiled in into that signed binary... aren't.

I can change the behaviour of many/most applications by just having read/write access to files; Can you give me examples of mainstream applications that are resistant to filesystem tampering when eg.you have install access? Maybe I'm missing something.

Comment by mikestew 3 hours ago

Well, I had to call it something. File system DBs were a problem long before FoxPro’s DBCs, yes. Yes, it’s an architectural decision. Sharp cookies would just modify the files directly. But that would just trash data (or bump my hourly rate in the HR DB). Most of the time, “full access to data” doesn’t necessarily mean “run arbitrary code”. In this case, it does, which I don’t think folks expect, hence “hole”.

Comment by dspillett 3 hours ago

> Well, I had to call it something.

A significant weakness?

A serious limitation for modern uses / in modern environments?

Comment by kennywinker 2 hours ago

A massive footgun? :)

Comment by HoldOnAMinute 5 hours ago

Maybe someone can put the core FoxPro ideas on top of SQLite

Comment by EvanAnderson 5 hours ago

If it isn't client / server architecture there's no privilege separation using SQLite either. The storage format isn't the concern. Rather, the concern is it all runs in the same OS security context.

Comment by j45 24 minutes ago

Could the security hole not be closed up?

Maybe there's a way to run them more securely with a wrapper.

It does make sense to try and move to a sql db of some type, and my immediate thought is if something like Postgres, with a plugin or extension or two couldn't simulate enough of Foxpro.

That, or rewriting large parts of the DB engine seem readily much more possible now with LLM driven development.

Comment by SigmundA 2 hours ago

I have memories of supporting a Netware network with a custom Foxpro app used by a bunch of telemarketers in the mid 90's.

When there was application error the source code would pop up in dialog maybe a some sort of debugger and the end users would just type a bunch of crap in trying to get out of it and hit enter and save the changes and corrupt the app for everyone and it would have to be restored from backup.

Pretty sure it was Foxpro or maybe dbase, definitely wasn't MS Access as it was still a dos based client.

Very different idea about app security back then, was really nice to developed the db, GUI front end and printable reports all in single runtime though.

Comment by ransom1538 2 hours ago

True. When someone on the internet sends me a vfp file... i just open it in my IE6.0 no cares given.

Comment by boredjohnny 5 hours ago

Thanks, this is the most useful comment here. FoxDev reads the DBC the same way VFP does, so today it inherits the hole exactly. The runtime is actually the one place it can be fixed. I would put in a hash of the stored procedure text into the built executable and refuse to run a container whose procs don't match. Adding it to the list. Would you mind if I quoted your comment in the issue?

Comment by mikestew 4 hours ago

Feel free to quote me, contact info in profile if needed.

EDIT: sorry, I originally just skimmed your comment. I was unclear in my original comment: the files can be accessed and “hacked” from the file system with a text editor. (And a bunch of deleted stuff because I misread your comment.)

Comment by 4 hours ago

Comment by mamcx 2 hours ago

> Here’s my problem with reviving FoxPro in any form

And then it moves to the orthogonal problem:

> SQL DB

(that in fact means: An app made for end users that are not trusted by default but really are somehow that is a improper implementation of the relational model and more improper developer platform, more like wordpress, and because is mostly deployed "networked" suddenly need to worry about remote access, that is totally not the main point of old Fox/dbase apps!)

And the funny things: SQL injection is not a problem with a Fox app (use of a stringy api is a MAJOR issue that lack of a permission model)

---

As one that have long experience with FoxPro and try to revive the style, lets go to the core of the problem:

Imagine you say to a C developer:

"You can't use `fopen` and other filesystem APIs, because well you have access to to the whole filesystem"

Or even better, the user!:

"You should not own your own filesystem!"

The DB is like the filesystem, but not that dumb!

The permissions model is orthogonal. Maybe you (normal) filesystem is running on a networked deployment with access by spies with and other personal that should have top-notch security.

Or is just a embedded device.

WHAT DECIDE THE SECURITY MODEl?

The kind of storage?

Nope!

Is the deployment and use case.

Similarly, what decide the security of a database?, the fact is a "database"?

No!, that is ridiculous. If you need to layer some kind of access control or whatever, is outside of the kind of storage you choses.

In fact, see how Wonderfully could be all if the "filesystem" where an actual database and you can run relational queries on top: Millions of "cli utilities" suddenly are unnecessary, the user (and developers!) have more freedom and control, and your big corp with byzantine rules will be even more happy.

----

P.D: I'm very well aware of the limitations of Fox, is ancient software! but the style of programming? Is like have a taste of start trek

P.D.2: And note that the vector attack described here is a fault of the dumb filesystem, actually!

Comment by movedx 3 minutes ago

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.

Comment by progmetaldev 6 hours ago

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).

Comment by nradov 5 hours ago

When networked PCs and rapid application development platforms became popular there was a "Cambrian explosion" of custom electronic health record and practice management applications built by doctor hackers who knew exactly what they wanted, and had just barely enough technical skill to sort of make it partially work. Those have gradually died off because commercial products kept improving, and the cost of complying with security and interoperability requirements kept escalating. But I predict that the cycle will now repeat because the combination of AI coding tools plus headless EHR platforms (built in security, storage, and APIs) has made it easier to build a custom EHR that actually works.

Comment by wjholden 4 hours ago

Yes, I am seeing exactly this at my own workplace. Two things have happened close together: low code and LLMs. I don't personally like using low code solutions (such as PowerBI and Power Automate), but for many knowledge workers this is all they have. Now you can just ask your favorite LLM how to do stuff and it can help you. It's not exactly vibe coding because these people really understand what they have and what they want, they just don't know the syntax to get there.

Comment by ASalazarMX 6 hours ago

DBase/Fox Pro were born when local networks weren't common, it excelled as a single-user batteries-included IDE. Now that you mention this, I understand why it couldn't work these days as it is.

I also think it won't be that hard to make it multiuser, that's a long-ago solved problem these days.

Comment by mikestew 5 hours ago

It wasn’t that hard to make it multiuser back on the day, either. But as OP discovered, FoxPro also made it very easy to write shit multiuser code. Pessimistic/optimistic locking, etc.? It was in there, but you had to use it.

Comment by cowboylowrez 6 hours ago

One fear I saw manifest in a job was before AI, and an associate was doing a screen for a request in dot net and it let the user read the record, edit the record and write the record. Last person to write the record won of course.

At this tier of small time company IT, I am hoping that AI will actually improve the quality of code, because people who write racey nolock code that occasionally "drops a few records" are probably hopefully not posting their code to forums or alternatively getting roasted to pieces if they do so its my hope they are only represented in training data as "what not to do."

Comment by 4RealFreedom 4 hours ago

Just antidotal but I don't know how many times I've had to help developers fix their vibe coded code to account for concurrency problems. LLMs don't seem to be very good at picking up on this today unless you call it out.

Comment by rynn 3 hours ago

Wow, I’ve had the opposite experience. I’ve needed to talk Claude down from Redis clusters for hobby projects to avoid concurrency edge cases.

Although to your point, it struggles to do anything with SQLite beyond a single user even when its architecturally not a problem

Comment by networkOne 4 hours ago

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.

Comment by neilv 5 hours ago

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. :) )

Comment by EvanAnderson 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by 4RealFreedom 3 hours ago

Oh boy, do I have some stories. I've worked with many companies that actually still do this today. You'd be amazed at what someone can do with VFP and Citrix - or maybe horrified.

Comment by EvanAnderson 3 hours ago

The only Citrix Metaframe (and later Windows Terminal Server) machines I ever deployed in Real Life were because of shared-file database-based applications.

Comment by fragmede 6 hours ago

> it sucks when one of these systems outgrows the capabilities of the underlying platform.

It did, but does it still with AI? Back in the 90's it was crazy painful. I'm not in the same situations as I was back then, but I'm optimistic about the future being better because we have better tools today than we did back then.

Comment by kstrauser 6 hours ago

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

Comment by NoelJacob 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by rayiner 4 hours ago

> 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?

Comment by lloydatkinson 2 hours ago

Not sure but I'm getting really sad reading anything and seeing this AI speak everywhere.

Comment by autoexec 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by mikestorrent 1 hour ago

moricons.dll holds a very special place in my heart.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250505-00/?p=11...

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6705/what...

I love the detail in these things... icons today don't take advantage of the incredibly high resolution of modern screens, they're just wishy washy corporate logos

Comment by EvanAnderson 4 hours ago

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.

Comment by 16 minutes ago

Comment by meerita 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by outworlder 5 hours ago

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)

Comment by jermaustin1 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by Kuyawa 4 hours ago

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

Comment by ang_cire 7 hours ago

I loved visual fox pro as a kid (~10). I made little UIs to open my favorite sites and files.

Comment by Hasz 1 hour ago

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 :)

Comment by jordand 6 hours ago

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)

Comment by post-it 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by alwillis 6 hours ago

> Access is so good. I can't believe there's no universal equivalent for Linux and Mac.

On the Mac, it's FileMaker,[1] which was released in 1985. Claris is a subsidiary of Apple.

[1]: https://www.claris.com/blog/2026/claris-filemaker-2026-is-no...

Comment by AshleyGrant 3 hours ago

The father of a girl I dated in college (circa 2000s) built an entire student tracking system using FileMaker to use at the High School he was the Principal of.

We didn't date for long, but I'd be curious to know how long that system ran.

Comment by flopsamjetsam 5 hours ago

So glad to see Filemaker is still alive! I had thought it had gone in one of Apple's software culls years ago.

Comment by kstrauser 2 hours ago

I looked at FileMaker a few years ago because it would’ve been a nice setup for a semi-technical acquaintance. And then I saw its pricing, and we went in a different direction.

Comment by nullsmack 6 hours ago

I'm shocked in general at the lack of open source Rapid Application Development software.

Comment by coryrc 1 hour ago

There was[0] Dabo, an attempt at a modern Visual Foxpro in Python https://dabo.leafe.com/

0: sort-of "is" rather than "was": https://blog.leafe.com/creativity-and-ai-models/

Comment by eterm 6 hours ago

Someone will no doubt correct my hazy memory, but I wonder how much to blame was the fact that default QT apps were so ugly around the time that was the height of RAD, and QT was the only(?) well-supported cross-platform cross-DE gui framework at that time.

On windows you could RAD your way to a good looking windows application that looked and behaved like everything else. On linux, default behaviour was either ugly, or not very compatible, or heavily customised anyway, and that didn't change until much later with improvements to GTK.

Comment by jordand 6 hours ago

For RAD, Delphi was filling a pretty big niche in its day, and it's still used in some companies local to me. I remember being told during an interview that it performs really well and it's kept up well enough with the changing times. I knew someone from University about 10 years ago that got her first Software job writing Delphi!

Comment by progmetaldev 6 hours ago

I think Microsoft coming out with XAML/WPF created too much complexity for most of the developers that were working with WinForms. Although the code had better separation from the interface, it also took quite a bit more effort to get an application up and running quickly. They took the "R" out of RAD, and then kind of put both WinForms and WPF on life support, while continuing to tout cross-platform on .NET Core without a first-party GUI platform. Now it just looks like Azure was always going to be the solution, to tie users into a platform they don't fully control.

Comment by jordand 4 hours ago

I ran into all of this with the first few years of my career. Even after years, MAUI has struggled to gain traction and Avalonia has grown and is far more the de-facto choice for .NET cross-platform GUI. Both work collegues and myself have ran into XAML/WPF Styling horrors where it's all one giant aggregation/inheritance nightmare generated by Blend (and done by someone that didn't quite know what they were doing)

Comment by rtpg 36 minutes ago

Qt Quick and Qt Creator isn't RAD per se but I feel like it gets you close.

Comment by aleph_minus_one 4 hours ago

> I'm shocked in general at the lack of open source Rapid Application Development software.

They exist:

- In particular in the 90s and 00s, Tcl/Tk was really magic for creating user interfaces for small applications under GNU/Linux.

- Lazarus attempts to be an open-source analogue to Delphi

- LibreOffice Base attempts to fill the same niche as Microsoft Access

- Historically, in the time of Gtk+ 1.x and 2.x Glade [1] was an editor for clicking together user interfaces. Well, development ceased, and under GNU/Linux there is no attitude of retaining backwards compatibility with applications/libraries that are not maintained anymore (but which might be business-critical).

- ...

But of course Rapid Application Development is much more popular in the business world which is (at least in many European countries) a rather Microsoft-centric environment. Additionally, the typical developer that uses Rapid Application Development is often a subject-matter expert in some department who also knows a little bit about programming (i.e. is not in deep love with programming), and not a programming expert who also knows about some other specialized topics that are important for the business.

On the other hand, the open source environment typically rather attracts people who really like programming.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glade_Interface_Designer

Comment by markus_zhang 6 hours ago

Probably because *nix programmers in general are the black coffee long beard RTFM type.

Comment by AshamedCaptain 6 hours ago

There have been shitloads of open source RADs. They do not generate much interest.

Comment by ChickeNES 5 hours ago

Well, (F)OSS projects have never been known for great UI/UX (with some exceptions like Blender), so it doesn't surprise me much

Comment by 6 hours ago

Comment by Lammy 5 hours ago

Nerds have vested interests (exposure/influence/status based on exclusivity of skill) to oppose letting ”the wrong people” create software, versus a company like Microsoft is the other way around because they get paid and get to further-entrench their platforms (but I repeat myself).

And/or too many people have internalized a feeling of “I am Very Smart because I know better than to ever try anything unique”, as exemplified by that awful xkcd ‘Standards’ learned-helplessness comic somebody will always rush to post in a discussion of any New Thing, and thus would never even dream of creating RAD tools whose entire premise is the creation of bespoke software.

Comment by 4 hours ago

Comment by progmetaldev 6 hours ago

In the mid-2000's, I built a lot of applications replacing Access. I always met with the actual users of the system, and made sure they understood that once I took over development, they weren't going to be able to build out their own forms anymore. A few clients were turned away, but most could live with paying for myself to make any future edits, so that they could concentrate on the business objective rather than coding in Access. I never really had the same success with replacing Excel, except for a few systems where it needed to be true multi-user.

Comment by aperrien 4 hours ago

There's Gambas: https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html

Lazarus/FreePascal: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Kivy: https://kivy.org/

Grails: https://grails.apache.org/

And any number of combinations using the web. I think they've just fallen off in popularity due to all the web interfaces, honestly.

Comment by flowerlad 6 hours ago

> Access is so good. I can't believe there's no universal equivalent for Linux and Mac.

Here you go: https://visualdb.com There are many modern alternatives, in fact.

Comment by jordand 6 hours ago

I've looked into these before and they're often a monthly/annual SaaS that are either by a one-person company, or worse, something like AirTable that gets crazy price hikes out of nowhere (or shut down) that's a disaster for a small company. Place I worked already had Microsoft Office paid for so why move away from Access.

Comment by flowerlad 6 hours ago

If it works for you then there is no need to switch. But Access is a desktop app, and in 2026 it is pretty unusual to use a desktop app for business applications. Also, Microsoft is no longer developing Access.

Comment by jordand 6 hours ago

In 2026, Microsoft Access is still fully supported and bundled into Microsoft 365 Enterprise subscriptions. Back in 2014, I'd said to my employer that it's not going anywhere for at least a decade (and that they can fully ignore a report they'd received from the NDPB that oversaw their work that suggested Access might be at risk of disappearing)

Comment by samplatt 5 hours ago

>In 2026, Microsoft Access is still fully supported and bundled into Microsoft 365 Enterprise subscriptions.

Having a subscription is only a small part of the total cost. Access works best when combined with a bunch of VBS/macro scripts, which IT departments globally are trying very hard to stamp out completely. Access also needs its own set of permissions and manager of permissions since it can't inherit permissions from anywhere of the other usual Microslop security stores - at least, not without having its own developer/maintainer/champion on tap.

Not to mention the agreed wisdom that while Access is fantastic for rapid-prototyping applications/warehouses/ETL processes, any "permanent" DB/DBMS/solution worth doing in Access is worth doing in a 'proper' database with a proper front-end.

Comment by EvanAnderson 3 hours ago

> Access works best when combined with a bunch of VBS/macro scripts...

You're thinking of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which is interpreted inside of Access. The standalone Visual Basic Scripting (VBScript) is a completely different thing, and eliminating VBScript doesn't have any ramifications for Access.

Comment by jordand 4 hours ago

All true and yeah, I did discuss with my employer at the time about how they needed to think long term about migrating to SQL Server or MySQL/PostgreSQL with a web front-end. However, the giant IT contractor they were stuck with would only allow SQL Server and charge a fortune, and they didn't have the time/money/know-how to go anywhere with that. They were stuck with Access!

Comment by flowerlad 5 hours ago

As long as it has a significant number of users Microsoft will keep shipping it. But it is not getting significant new investment. If you are building a new application you're better off using Power Apps, Dataverse, SharePoint, Power Automate, etc.

Comment by criddell 6 hours ago

> Microsoft is no longer developing Access

I don’t think that’s true.

Comment by flowerlad 4 minutes ago

Have you seen "Weekend at Bernie's"?

Comment by criddell 6 hours ago

That seems to be missing an actual database. Access has everything included. Run Access.exe and away you go. This looks way more complicated.

Comment by flowerlad 6 hours ago

It includes SQLite

Comment by chaostheory 4 hours ago

Technically, MS Power Apps is the successor to MS Access. Power Apps is a web application so that solves the cross platform problem.

Having played with it, it’s not as turn key as either MS Access or something like Airtable. It can be overly complicated and it’s infected with the paradox of choice.

Comment by DANmode 3 hours ago

Spec one.

Start one.

Has someone written on or otherwise worked on this?

Comment by Atotalnoob 6 hours ago

Sqlite?

Comment by kstrauser 6 hours ago

Access is a whole package with form designers, widgets, scripting, etc. so that you can build an entire distributable app from it. SQLite's a brilliant little DB but it only covers a tiny portion of what Access does.

I kinda loathe access for any number of reasons, but appreciate the dev tools it put into the hands of non-developers. A great many people who'd be passive users on most systems were able to build apps to meet their business and requirements, and although Access was janky as hell, that's very, very cool. I think it's most spiritually similar to HyperCard on Mac: you wouldn't want to write a whole large app in it, and if you're an experienced developer there are any number of tools you'd rather write programs with. But if you weren't a traditional developer (e.g. an office worker or a student or a home computer enthusiast, etc.) it gave you a pleasant hand-holding process for making your ideas come to life. I respect that.

Comment by cowboylowrez 5 hours ago

I thought gambas was interesting but I didn't do much with it.

Comment by kstrauser 5 hours ago

Gambas was neat. I think we also looked at Kivy at the time, and I think there were a couple of other Python RAD systems that aimed to be similar to VFP in spirit, although not even slightly compatible.

Comment by rufugee 5 hours ago

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...

Comment by briHass 1 hour ago

DBFs tend to be the easy part, in my experience in a similar company (not as much revenue.) The spec is simple enough that one can write a reader/writer in an afternoon, even before AI.

My biggest challenge is the speed at which calculation heavy business logic can operate in FP, even on network shares, as long as they're optimized for IOPs not bandwidth. Trying to adapt similar data access patterns to a networked RDBMS will kill you with round trip and connection overhead. Converting that logic to set-based operations or stored procedures means altering logic and all the risks that entails.

Comment by boredjohnny 2 hours ago

Hi Neat! you mentioned you guys are already on a rewrite path. That is the proper way forward and I recommend gathering as much information about the product and edge cases as possible. Document every business rule, every product decision. Handwaving aside, audit the Foxscript source code, clone it to a virtual machine or container. Any issue you face, feel free to post an issue on Github as I would love a few edge cases on the wild. As the Foxscript runtime relies on 64 bit offsets for the DBF/Memo, once a DBF (past the 2GB) is opened they can't be migrated back to old VFP9, so I recommend to test this carefully on an airgaped setup with tests DBF.

Comment by sm-silversight 4 hours ago

Would you trust foxscript? I'm curious if this is just a wide-net data exfil attempt.

Comment by rufugee 4 hours ago

I wouldn't trust anything without further review.

I would welcome a community effort. There are many (?) companies still relying on FoxPro. Vibe coding a solution is feasible these days. We've vibe-coded a few from FoxPro to Ruby on Rails with great success. I'm no longer stressed about the future... just the timeline.

Comment by boredjohnny 2 hours ago

Fair concern. MIT licensed, all source code on Github for audit. Only Nodejs + a Rust toolchain is required to compile it. On windows (for the FLL bridge) it needs Visual Studio C++ tools

Comment by tombert 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by jhbadger 1 hour ago

I was an undergraduate in the late 1980s/early 1990s and I worked part time in the university library working on databases and interfaces first in dBase III then Foxbase (the predecessor to Foxpro; basically an extended dBase III clone) then DOS FoxPro. I rather liked them, but this was long before I had ever seen SQL or anything like that. The weird thing was that my boss (besides being the library's IT guy) was a taekwondo instructor! What is it about FoxPro and that?

Comment by tombert 1 hour ago

I'm wondering if it's the same guy. Without doxxing yourself too much, you didn't happen to be in the central Florida area did you?

Comment by fareesh 5 hours ago

modi comm taekwando

Comment by moron4hire 5 hours ago

You are right because I've never touched Erlang, otherwise I did the same for a TKD studio as well.

Comment by tombert 3 hours ago

I didn't do Erlang at the Tae Kwan Do studio, that was the FoxPro and ColdFusion (and ActionScript/Flex).

I have just had a lot of very odd jobs which has taken me in a bunch of directions.

Comment by smackeyacky 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by SequoiaHope 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by fragmede 6 hours ago

MECHANIC

HOURLY RATE

$100/HR ==== STANDARD

$150/HR ==== IF YOU WATCH

$175/HR ==== IF YOU HELP

$200/HR ==== IF YOU WORKED ON IT FIRST

$250/HR ==== IF YOU TELL ME HOW TO DO MY JOB

Comment by mamcx 6 hours ago

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

Comment by mikestew 5 hours ago

The runtime didn’t contain the debugger or other dev tools, only the dev version/IDE did. It did contain the report writer, though.

Comment by karim79 4 hours ago

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.

Comment by devy 7 hours ago

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?

Comment by daotoad 6 hours ago

Apple still sells Filemaker.

https://www.claris.com/filemaker/

Comment by ndiddy 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by boredjohnny 5 hours ago

bigger tables (2 GB cap) and no source code changes.

Comment by opengrass 5 hours ago

>1 commit 2 hours ago

>domain registered 7 hours ago

>ghost pusher named Dev

Comment by rpmisms 5 hours ago

Ugh. My first job was rewriting foxpro. Bad memories.

Comment by Pannoniae 6 hours ago

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?

Comment by boredjohnny 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by fragmede 6 hours ago

Is it less performance if you compare the hardware it was probably running on vs today?

Comment by boredjohnny 5 hours ago

Because the same module runs in three places: inside the Electron IDE, in the shipped app, and in the test suite under jsdom, with no native build per platform. The other reason is the boundary itself: wasm exports can't re-enter, which forced the design where every side effect is yielded to the host and the VM is never on the stack while a dialog is up. That's what makes MESSAGEBOX not freeze the window. Perf isn't where these apps hurt, they're I/O and UI bound, and VFP itself was a p-code interpreter. The crate is plain Rust, the CLI runner is native, so a native build is a cargo flag away if it ever matters

Comment by dang 4 hours ago

Can you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.

Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but your comments are getting classified that way.

(The project itself is fine, of course, to submit to HN. We just want text on this site to be entirely human-written.)

Comment by boredjohnny 3 hours ago

Hi! thank you for the candid response.

Comment by sehugg 7 hours ago

Clarion and Paradox thought one of them was going to win the tontine.

Comment by TMWNN 7 hours ago

R:BASE is still around

Comment by markus_zhang 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by nrawe 7 hours ago

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!

Comment by SequoiaHope 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by 7 hours ago

Comment by password4321 3 hours ago

This is great! Next up: VB6

Comment by 7 hours ago

Comment by zergrush 6 hours ago

what was foxpro , for younger gen here

Comment by xattt 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by Kuyawa 4 hours ago

A tool and language to write apps where you could write "Select * from customers" in the command window and get results right there in a browse table, beautifully

Not a single language nowadays can do that

Comment by neverartful 6 hours ago

Original - FoxPro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FoxPro

Successor - Visual FoxPro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_FoxPro

Comment by __d 6 hours ago

An IDE, form designer, language, runtime, and database engine.

People used it to write business applications. Like Microsoft Access, or Visual Basic.

It started as a competitor to dBase II/III called FoxBase, and then Microsoft bought it.

Comment by wolfi1 6 hours ago

a database program, IIRC it was a program not by microsoft but MS bought it and killed it off

Comment by whartung 4 hours ago

Yes, they bought it. But they didn’t buy it and stab it in the heart. They developed it for several years.

A primary bit of tech that came out of the purchase was the core DB engine. They reworked this into what became the Jet engine. The Jet engine was the core of Access.

Access was in many ways a next generation of FoxPro. They both went after the same niche of desktop and file server DB applications. But FoxPro carried the legacy of its dBase roots, FoxBase was basically “better dBase”, but had to appeal to and be familiar to dBase developers.

Access had no heritage like that to hold it back, and was a better citizen in the VB/Office/OLE/COM world. It was also more SQL first even though it kept things like DBF files as first class citizens.

Comment by pstuart 6 hours ago

I learned SQL with FoxPro on the Mac in the 90s. It was a great app.

Comment by dwd 4 hours ago

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)

Comment by whalesalad 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by ravenstine 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by yallpendantools 6 hours ago

We need https://xkcd.com/1742/ but maybe with a different scale category.

Unlike most other people here, I wouldn't really say I've developed a radar for "the vibecoded webpage design"; I thankfully don't dabble as much with FE nowadays so if you told me this is default Bootstrap 4 or something, I'd have believed you. But as I scrolled through the claims, my AI-generated text radar pinged hard and I was caught in a moment of dissonance between the sleek design and the AI-cadenced copy.

Suddenly, I would've had more confidence if this was a black default font text on a white webpage, served from a .edu domain.

> The nightly is rebuilt from every push to main and published as a pre-release on GitHub. Unsigned, so the first launch asks you to confirm.

But with only two commits within the hour this really reads more like a concept of a release plan than an actual regimented/automated release process.

My problem with vibecoded projects was never whether if it was going to work but whether if the failure modes are known. And you can only know the failure modes if you check your work. Hence why, I realized that a history of alpha and beta releases for an opensource project is a signal of quality.

Comment by boredjohnny 2 hours ago

Yeah sorry about that. Didn't thought about releasing it as this was a solution for my dad's friend shop that ran an old really old VFP project and didnt wanted/care to migrate. So I put together the site quickly using Claude. I might give it some human love next weekend

Comment by katzenq 1 hour ago

Fuck you. Put the bare minimum of effort or thought into something you claim to have made before spamming it online like it's an achievement. You didn't make this or do real work. You're functionally indistinguishable from a spambot and just want attention for zero effort.

Comment by fragmede 6 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by moron4hire 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by itomato 7 hours ago

Cool - now do Lotus Approach

Comment by _s_a_m_ 6 hours ago

Hahahah this is too funny 8)

I wished almost it was terminal based

Comment by 7 hours ago

Comment by zero_shift 6 hours ago

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?

Comment by silveira 6 hours ago

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".

Comment by kodomomo 5 hours ago

"Every picture is a real session."

Dead giveaway.

Comment by sm-silversight 6 hours ago

Probably. The website does look too good though, none of the design cruft ("eyebrows") that LLMs like. But the last design I let it do was from opus 4.7 or gpt 5.3.

Comment by Kwpolska 6 hours ago

It does look very LLM-y to me, the copy certainly is.

Comment by sm-silversight 4 hours ago

Yeah, you're right. The models have just gotten better at design.

Comment by stuaxo 6 hours ago

There's a continuum between vibe coded and directed LLM, I guess we'll see which it is.

Comment by fragmede 6 hours ago

Obviously they used AI at some point in the project, the question to you is what is your definition of vibe coding and how does it discredit the effort they did put into it?

Comment by nxobject 6 hours ago

One benchmark would be: would someone with a legacy FoxPro LOB app be entrusting their data to this? Or is it just a nice "wow, that's a cool project"?

Comment by roywiggins 5 hours ago

The website is obviously and gratingly LLM-voiced. I don't know how people aren't tired of paragraphs like this yet:

"Visual FoxPro is a 32-bit program, and that decides more than it appears to. It is why a table stops at two gigabytes, why a memo file stops at two gigabytes, and why a big report runs out of memory on a machine with plenty to spare. The limits are signed 32-bit numbers buried in the file handling, not a licensing decision anybody made."

and

"The editor checks what you type through that very compiler, so what it underlines and what the runtime refuses cannot drift apart."