[Info-vax] Anyone interested in another public access system

[David Weatherall]

JF Mezei wrote:

> I am surprised that POSIX is still being discussed.
> 
> I tried POSIX once on a 3100 VAX back in the 1990s.
> 
> POSIX wasn't VMS compatibility with UNIX, it was an application that
> ran on VMS and gave you a unix shell/prompt and Unix style filenames.
> And it was slow as molasses.
> 
> Compare this with Cygwin which provides a fair amount of Unix
> compatibility on Windows and works and is deployed widely.
> 
> The current path that had been undertaken by the new england
> engineering  of VMS was to give native VMS some unix compatible
> tools, and fork() is perhaps the hardest to achieve.
> 
> The fact that engineers were able to port GTK, and Mozilla/Seamonkey
> to VMS does show a fair degree of unix compatibility, although
> building it on VMS requires a lot of work and middleware (PHP etc etc
> ).
> 
> If VMS came with all the tools that allowed even moi to build
> Seamonkey as easily as on a Unix system, I think that would be a great
> accomplishement.
> 
> A an aside, I was able to build imagemagick on VMS, and the build
> procedure failed on OS-X because of a missing utility !!!!! (can't
> remember which one but it was some type of unzip).

I use 'POSIX on VMS' in the context of DECThreads. I'm not sure which
is the chicken and the egg. Posix -> DECThreads or DECThreads with the
POSIX standard interface. Doesn't matter a great deal. The only real
point being that VMS supports the POSIX threading model. In retrospect
I almost I'd wished stuck to doing my multi-threading in the direct VMS
way, i.e. AST's etc. Oh Well.

Cheers - Dave. 

--