1. Business continuity often outweighs the cost/risk of rewriting
Many commenters stressed that rewriting a decades‑old line‑of‑business app is riskier than keeping it running, especially when the source code is unavailable or the business relies on “milking” the existing system.
- “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.” – smackeyacky
- “A customer wanted to keep milking their app for the foreseeable future, so here it is: the same language on a new runtime …” – boredjohnny
- “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.” – SequoiaHope
2. Technical limitations of the legacy platform drive modernization attempts
Discussions frequently highlighted the concrete constraints of Visual FoxPro (2 GB table/file size, 32‑bit limits, multi‑user/file‑locking issues, security holes) and the attempts to bypass them—e.g., moving to WASM, 64‑bit runtimes, or adding lambdas/JSON.
- “bigger tables (2 GB cap) and no source code changes.” – boredjohnny (reason for needing a new runtime)
- “there’s a huge security hole in the Database Container (DBC) design … With a little technical knowledge, one can modify that INSERT trigger to whatever you like.” – mikestew
- “If this is intended for desktop, why bother with WASM at all? Do you gain anything other than less performance?” – Pannoniae
3. Strong nostalgia and personal attachment to the old RAD tools
Numerous users shared fond memories of learning FoxPro, Access, or similar rapid‑application‑development environments, often tied to family or early career experiences, underscoring a sentimental loss of those accessible development platforms.
- “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.” – meerita
- “When I was an adolescent, the dBase and Fox products were my first paid software development…” – neilv
- “I might literally be the only person on earth that can honestly say I have been paid to write FoxPro, Erlang, F#, and ColdFusion.” – tombert