[Info-vax] Compilers and architectures

[JF Mezei]

(subject renamed from some meaningless one)

John Reagan wrote:

> The fact that Itanium is EPIC doesn't really matter to most code other than 
> compilers or those brave few who want to write Itanium assembly for 
> performance reasons 

In the case of VMS to Alpha, is it correct to assume that they had to
build Alpha cross compilers on VAX-VMS so that they could generate a
minimal VMS binary and then boot it on Alpha ?  (since there were no
tools yet available on Alpha and there were no other OS running on Alpha
at the time).

In the case of a theoretical port to a 64 bit 8086, would they build
such cross platform compilers on Alpha or IA64 VMS to generate the early
8086 VMS binaries ?

Or would they use existing Intel compilers on windows/linux to compile
and generate the early VMS binaries for 8086 ?


And once you havce a minimal VMS running on the 64 bit 8086, how
difficult is it to port 8086 compilers written for linux or windows over
to VMS ? Is it mostly just adding the vms-style command line parsing and
the logic to search include files in libraries and/or directories  with
the rest more or less unchanged ? or are there significant compiler core
changes needed for VMS ?