>>What do you think you would get beyond a FoxPro solution? AFAIK I haven't heard of the script or even the template rendering being a bottle neck in big applications. The bottleneck invariably is always long running FoxPro code operations, not the string output generation thanks to the string optimizations Calvin made in VFP 8 and 9.

I was thinking along the lines of that SCX to dHTML renderer you wrote once upon a time that's probably only remembered now by the likes of you and me. ;-) So not re-writing the underlying HTML5 rendering engine, just hooking into it on each platform. As you might expect I've done that using WW for years at the server, but I'm imagining a native app doing the same thing.

BTW, thanks for highlighting this string stuff; I'd used textmerge for years (as did Web Connect once upon a time!) and was very pleased to see that string concatenation was subsequently made more efficient as you've published more than once. AFAICS you are the main reason that gem was exposed in the wider community. So, thanks!

for the rest: my phone is more powerful than the 386x used to develop my first ever windows app. So now I imagine a native cross-platform 4GL that can produce cross-platform apps, just as Fox promised almost 30 years ago. The big challenge of matching cross platform UI has since been solved by others in the form of HTML5/Javascript etc that we know can be produced relatively easily, so even a cross-platform FP2.0 would be better than options I've reviewed to date. I'm not wed to Fox but if I can't find anything else, why not? Yeah I know there's some disagreement at the idea of native apps over web apps, but I'm fairly happy with my reasoning.