Astro Hacker News - Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived

progmetaldev |next [-]

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).

kstrauser |next |previous [-]

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

EvanAnderson |next |previous [-]

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.

fragmede |root |parent [-]

> 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.

meerita |next |previous [-]

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.

jordand |next |previous [-]

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)

post-it |root |parent [-]

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.

progmetaldev |root |parent |next [-]

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 me true multi-user.

flowerlad |root |parent |next |previous [-]

> 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.

nullsmack |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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

eterm |root |parent |next [-]

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.

AshamedCaptain |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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

markus_zhang |root |parent |previous [-]

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

Atotalnoob |root |parent |previous [-]

Sqlite?

ang_cire |next |previous [-]

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

zero_shift |next |previous [-]

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?

sm-silversight |root |parent |next [-]

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.

Kwpolska |root |parent [-]

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

fragmede |root |parent |previous [-]

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?

tombert |next |previous [-]

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.

jermaustin1 |next |previous [-]

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.

devy |next |previous [-]

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?

daotoad |root |parent [-]

Apple still sells Filemaker.

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

markus_zhang |next |previous [-]

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.

nrawe |next |previous [-]

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!

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sehugg |next |previous [-]

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

TMWNN |root |parent [-]

R:BASE is still around

zergrush |next |previous [-]

what was foxpro , for younger gen here

neverartful |root |parent |next [-]

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

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

__d |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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.

wolfi1 |root |parent |previous [-]

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

VCFundedGenYer |next |previous [-]

It's sad that AI slop like this just gets blindly upvoted on HN.

All the comments are also inauthentic and weirdly sycophantic reviews from new accounts.

itomato |next |previous [-]

Cool - now do Lotus Approach

whalesalad |next |previous [-]

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.

ravenstine |root |parent |next [-]

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.

fragmede |root |parent |previous [-]

You'll get over it.

_s_a_m_ |next |previous [-]

Hahahah this is too funny 8)

I wished almost it was terminal based

jamesforestwest |next |previous [-]

[dead]

boredjohnny |next |previous [-]

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?

mamcx |root |parent |next [-]

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

Pannoniae |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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?

fragmede |root |parent [-]

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

smackeyacky |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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.

SequoiaHope |root |parent [-]

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.

ndiddy |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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.

SequoiaHope |root |parent |previous [-]

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.