>More like VFP is a reliable old car but you need to use several kludges (i.e. 3rd party tools and work-arounds) to get it doing everything you want but ... even then it wont do many things that modern interfaces do. WinDev does every single thing you want out of the box and the suite of controls are totally modern and up to date. I dont want to list all the features, I cant, but here are some biggies:
>
>32 bit or 64 bit exe
For most business apps, 32-bits is enough. Even versions of Office 365 running on my 64-bit machine are 32-bit.
>Multi-threading
Run multiple processes and use the built-in SendMessage() process to coordinate them. We use this presently on several of our apps.
>PDF handling
PDF is a third-party tool. Everybody who adds PDF features will be addressing a 3rd party tool. Some may bring the code inside the tool to do it seemingly natively, but they're addressing a standard, and most likely using an existing library to do it. We can do the same in VFP thanks to a simple program like PDF3.PRG.
>Office Document handling including XLSX
Use ActiveX, built-in to Windows and VFP. As long as Office is installed ... it works.
>Image handling
GDI+ comes with Windows. While difficult to wield, there are easy-to-use third party options for those who need to do advanced graphics. Most business apps do not need this.
>Communications FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, etc.
All of these can be done with third party tools, and every tool would need some support from some library. Again, as with PDF, they may bring it internally, but it's unlikely they're using a completely custom feature set written using sockets to get the work done. It's possible though.
>Encryption tools
>Database with true encryption options
This is, in my opinion, the greatest lacking feature in VFP today. No ability to encrypt data to keep spying eyes out of it. Anyone who can get a copy of the DBF can observe what's in there, meaning it requires manual assertion of encryption on every field you seek to encrypt. Doable, but annoying, and definitely requires custom code. This is one of the first things I addressed with Visual FreePro (the full version) with secure tables and secure .SDX indexes.
>Compression and Zip management tools
These are built in to Windows. You can use them directly.
lo = CREATEOBJECT("shell.application")
lo.NameSpace(target).CopyHere(file, 16 + 1024) >Charting and graphing
FoxPro has always provided some graphs. :-)
>Royalty free and royalty free database
>Database full-text searching
>Extensive range of functions
>Windows API access
>Create exe, DLL, service
>Connect to any database (basically any)
>Built in setup packager and framework management
>Mix and match with other languages
>Hugely productive development environment
These have always been available in VFP. With ODBC drivers we can even connect to spreadsheets.
>Create Linux apps
>Same programming language for desktop app, web apps/websites, or mobile apps
>Lots of other stuff but we dont use everything obviously.
Some of these are fairly new creations / needs, and VFP10 would've integrated some of them. We see Microsoft's recent interest in supporting Linux with their newer toolsets geared at a Linux developer environment (Visual Studio Code, the ability to interact with GCC and GDB in both Windows and Linux versions, etc.). VFP would've carried those forward had it still been a concern of Microsoft.
People have always speculated why Microsoft got rid of VFP. I'll tell you exactly why it was: It was too powerful, too small, too fast, was too free (royalty-free runtime), and had too much extensibility to be set alongside their fee-based tools to be of any monetary value to them. They killed it because it would've made their other tools look bad, and now all we have are their other offerings.
Microsoft topped Apple recently to become the most valuable company in the world. They're going back-and-forth now. Microsoft's plan worked. The average developer who invested man-years over decades into apps based on XBASE / FPW / VFP development was sent out to dry. It's truly criminal what Microsoft did, which is why I began working on my own tools to counter them. I did them with a particular foundation though and found no support for that foundation, even though every one of my goals was an absolutely true and right one by any standard ... people just didn't want the reason why I was doing them to be a part of their life.
Broke my heart too, because I was a devoted man. With the tiniest fraction of support we could've had VFrP and VJr apps running today, with extensibility to add all those features you mention, and it would've been a less than 50 MB library to boot. In fact, I was going to target around 20-25 MB.
