[Info-vax] VMS - what is the current thinking amongst the user community

[prag]

On Mar 24, 4:02 pm, Jon.Po... at sector7.com wrote:
> It been a long time since I posted anything - Sector7 has been working
> away at migrating various applications - not much change there - We
> are releasing 3.3 of the migration libraries - which provide full
> duplex asynchronous I/O, AST's (supervisor, kernel, user etc) - and
> has tested at doing over 50,000 lock conversion per second on some old
> Intel equipment.
>
> So much for the bits and bytes - Obviously, the projects we see these
> days are no longer the 'low hanging fruit' - we are - as always -
> focused on complex code migrations - I would be very interested in
> understanding what the VMS users "feel about" VMS. We seem to be
> seeing large corporations with UNIX as the focus - that have a VMS
> server / cluster that is working perfectly - but - represents a very
> small percentage of the organizations skill set - and yet is as
> mission critial as any other server.
>
> We wont be soliciting / calling or even emailing - but - If anyone
> feel so inclined I'd especially like to hear:
>
> (a) Is your VMS system running mainly home grown application or
> packaged
> (b) If homegrown - are there any specific VMS API/ Subsystems - that
> make VMS irreplaceable (lock manager, clustering etc)
> (c) Is there any 'software' that would make life easier - I hate to
> use the DEC I14Y "Interoperability" - only because - I still miss
> DECUS / New Orleans and the TGV guys paying a for several great nights
> out.
> (d) Is there still the religious fervor associated with VMS? (after
> having to duplicate the AST/QIO/Lock Manager mechanisms - I have even
> a greater appreciation of VMS internals)
> (e) What programming languages are popular ? (no one has asked for
> BASIC or DIBOL for 2 or 3 years)
> (f) If VMS was going to be replaced - as VMS guys - what target would
> you lean toward (AIX/HPUX/LINUX/Solaris x86)
>
> I appreciate anyone taking the time to read this.
>
> Sincerely

We looked a migration for our inhouse app about a decade ago.  One
issue was real-time support.  But, I not sure our real-time
requirements are all that extreme.  Unix might be good enough.

And, there seemed to be a lack of support for forcing global sections
out to disk.   We checkpoint our system so it will come up in a
consistent state.   Seemed that UNIX did not give any control over
what was only in memory and what was pushed out to disk.  I figured I
would have to rewrite some stuff to put checkpointed data in a file
and close the file to get it out to disk.

That's what I recall as problems for us.