The Daily Hallucination

DAYTON, Ohio — A developer this week released a modern, 64-bit reimplementation of Visual FoxPro, the database programming environment Microsoft discontinued in 2007, prompting celebration among the language's remaining users and mild confusion at Heberling & Voss, a 22-person accounting firm whose FoxPro invoicing system has run every business day since 2004 and was not told it had died.

"We heard there was a revival," said office manager Georgette Plaskow-Innes, 61. "We did not know there had been a funeral. The invoices have been going out the whole time. Nobody sent a card."

The new runtime, written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly, opens old FoxPro projects directly with no migration step and supports tables of several hundred gigabytes, lifting the original's two-gigabyte ceiling. The firm's largest table, which holds every invoice since the first Bush administration, is 1.8 gigabytes, which Plaskow-Innes described as "a thing we have been very careful about for twenty years."

According to the project, 1,534 of the 1,722 language elements it implements have been tested against the original product. Longtime FoxPro developers said this left 188 untested elements, which they described as "about the right number for FoxPro."

The firm's system was written by a contractor named Lowell, who left in 2006 and whose name appears in 311 code comments, most of them reading "do not touch."

"Every few years a consultant comes in and says we need to migrate," Plaskow-Innes said. "They open the project, they see a form called frmFINAL_v2_REAL, and they go quiet, and they give us a quote for eighty thousand dollars, and we thank them for their time."

At press time, the firm had installed the new runtime, opened its 2004 project on the first try, and printed an invoice, which Plaskow-Innes said was "the first time in twenty years a computer has surprised me in a good way," before closing it immediately so as not to push their luck.