As you know I am in the cross platform fan group. But fox 2 model for me is bad on many sides.
First, why create cryptic table to build your screen from ? Even XAML is better insofar as relevant info is easier to get at. For screen meta handling I think the things Ethan tried to do with JASON for Android or Cell.Js for the web were better alternatives.
For second I think the times for creating your own VM is over - Lianja also offers C-bassed stuff but does not even port the embedded data engine to Android, needs Qt (AFAIK) to offer cross GUI. Either Graal or Dotnet (which is the reason I poke at xSharp), Python probably at the moment only safe on the strength of data analysts plugging R, NumPy and SciPy with C-based ML packages. Will be interesting to see if WASM cuts into JS...

My wish is for large building blocks (which backend store, which GUI lib, local cache as single-source-of-truth-VM or ORM or Poco-based reactivity, protocol/transport layer and paradigma[poll or reactive/push] to be exchangeble - but less Rube-Goldberg than much of the Javascript madness.
Similar to the times before 4GL, when you had distinctive libraries and glued them together. But the singular runtime has too much trouble integrating new things cropping up at one platform - NOT pushing everything inside the VM as FP tried but allowing native/OS wrappings with ease like Nativescript does is IMO the better model. Furthers platform innovation while offering early access to new things.
And yes, some RAD features reminiscent of Fox/vfp/Delphi should be added to the pot ;-)

my 0.22€
thomas


>Interesting. As you'll recall, prior to MS's purchase Fox was to be a cross-platform tool with Unix and Mac early versions even released. The scx still is a good model for this plan, but ever-increasing Windows reliance now forces emulation on other OS. Perhaps one day, somebody will "discover" (quote marks used for your enjoyment) the advantages of a cross platform tool that doesn't require Rube Goldberg piecings together, just a 4GL with native data handling and FPW-style screens that encapsulate most of the UI complexity.
>
>>>>There are two things from M$ I still use: skype and fox (on linux, both). And there's very little use I find for skype now, just to stay in touch with the two out-of-town daughters, and perhaps bi-weekly to say hi to the old gang from the last gig.
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>>Regarding the latter on Linux- how goes it?
>
>Mostly everything works, except some quirks:
>- the ctrl-backspace somehow got translated to ctrl+g. Defined a macro to put it back.
>- when coding, anything that ends a word and may trigger some intellisense action may as well switch focus to the next window, as if ctrl+F1 was pressed. It's largely annoying
>- the help doesn't work because it doesn't display pages - the IE emulator wine uses treats it as foreign content, and the properties dialog on the chm file doesn't have the checkbox to make it domestic
>- browser object doesn't work, haven't really tried to understand why. IE is emulated under wine, and the emulation somehow doesn't do COM, though it should as per the specs. There's probably something I should install, but I'm getting around without it. Though I almost made my own version of GoFish which wouldn't use it, but rather a simple editbox.
>- haven't tried to do ODBC yet, my pet projects use dbfs. Boy, how much I forgot about handling those... specially dbc stuff. Ages.
>- fun fact: windows within _screen will have close box etc as if in windowses; the desktop windows will use host OS widgets - so the same form had closebox on the right while I kept it in _screen, now it has it on the left.
>- since I went for the unstable build 19.10, a few things are getting hosed up, which didn't happen in the stable 18.04. So I'm getting to reboot from time to time, perhaps twice a week, which sometimes affects fox (i.e. it can get hosed if I don't look for symptoms, usually things getting slow or some things not responding. If I quit all my instances of fox and specially Waterfox (the browser, also somewhat unstable, as it's unable to kill forever looped javascript on time), then everything's fine, just reload fox (I usually have 3 or 4 running for different stuff that I do) and move on.