YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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

66 points boredjohnny 1 hour ago 39 comments

boredjohnny 1 hour ago | parent

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?

smackeyacky 37 minutes ago | parent

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 25 minutes ago | 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 29 minutes ago | parent

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 26 minutes ago | parent

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.

Pannoniae 12 minutes ago | parent

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?

mamcx 1 minute ago | parent

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

meerita 42 minutes ago | parent

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.

sehugg 42 minutes ago | parent

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

TMWNN 32 minutes ago | parent

R:BASE is still around

ang_cire 41 minutes ago | parent

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

tombert 40 minutes ago | parent

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.

EvanAnderson 37 minutes ago | parent

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 7 minutes ago | 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.

itomato 37 minutes ago | parent

Cool - now do Lotus Approach

whalesalad 36 minutes ago | parent

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 4 minutes ago | parent

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.

devy 35 minutes ago | parent

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 10 minutes ago | parent

Apple still sells Filemaker.

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

nrawe 35 minutes ago | parent

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!

jermaustin1 30 minutes ago | parent

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.

jordand 28 minutes ago | parent

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 24 minutes ago | 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.

nullsmack 21 minutes ago | parent

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

markus_zhang 18 minutes ago | parent

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

AshamedCaptain 14 minutes ago | parent

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

eterm 1 minute ago | parent

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.

Atotalnoob 5 minutes ago | parent

Sqlite?

markus_zhang 27 minutes ago | parent

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.

zergrush 13 minutes ago | parent

what was foxpro , for younger gen here

__d 8 minutes ago | parent

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.

neverartful 8 minutes ago | parent

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

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

wolfi1 7 minutes ago | parent

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

_s_a_m_ 10 minutes ago | parent

Hahahah this is too funny 8)

I wished almost it was terminal based

kstrauser 10 minutes ago | parent

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

zero_shift 10 minutes ago | parent

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?

fragmede 3 minutes ago | parent

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?

sm-silversight 2 minutes ago | parent

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.

VCFundedGenYer 6 minutes ago | parent

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.