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.
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.
One of the "certified" (wrong terminology) Board of Elections voter registration databases for Ohio is written in VFP and has TOTP 'MFA' to comply with a Secretary of State mandate.
If it isn't client / server architecture there's no privilege separation using SQLite either. It isn't the storage format that's the issue. It's that it all runs in the same OS security context.
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).
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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"?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can just open the database files directly.
I hang my head.
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).
I also think it won't be that hard to make it multiuser, that's a long-ago solved problem these days.
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."
[0]https://github.com/kstrauser/pgdbf
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...
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.
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.
Here you go: https://visualdb.com There are many modern alternatives, in fact.
I don’t think that’s true.
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.
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.
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.
Dead giveaway.
If they do, immediately copy the data over. They tend to crumble and fall apart (and contaminate the drive head, which will need cleaning)
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.
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.
Now, who's open sourcing and reviving FileMaker that Apple killed?
https://www.claris.com/filemaker/
Simply speaking from experience.
Successor - Visual FoxPro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_FoxPro
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.
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.
I wished almost it was terminal based
(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
Now your customer has two problems instead of just one.
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