[Info-vax] Dave Cutler, Prism, DEC, Microsoft, etc.

[Bob Gezelter]

On Nov 6, 6:53 am, Neil Rieck <n.ri... at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> Since any idiot can put up a web page these days, you know it all
> can't be true. So imagine my surprise when I bumped into this:
>
> http://radsoft.net/rants/20040831,00.shtml
>
> <quote>Dave always wanted to rewrite VMS in C. He hated Unix but loved
> C. As soon as he'd finished VMS he suggested the rewrite. He was
> turned down flat. Several years later he found himself in Seattle and
> essentially was doing the rewrite in C when word came DEC were tired
> of him.</quote>
>
> This article contains lots of other (possibly) questionable facts, but
> think about the statement above "rewrite VMS in C". If this had
> happened, we would have VMS or OpenVMS on any platform including
> x86-64
>
> NSR

Neil,

"Written in C" and "architecture independent" are two very different
things. With all due respect, I will take exception to the "on any
platform" observation in the original post.

The are hardware dependencies for each of the architectures, and there
are hardware presumptions that all three current architectures have in
common. Some of the most important were noted in my July 2001
"Thoughts on the Alpha->Itanium Announcement" (see http://www.rlgsc.com/alphaitanium.html).

In any event, the use of MACRO-32 is not the impediment. It has been
proven twice (e.g., ALPHA, Itanium) that a compiler can be
straightforwardly constructed to convert MACRO-32 in to the native
binary needed. In fact, having worked on portable code generators
during my university research time, I could observe that one could
write a MACRO-32 -> C translator, which would then "solve" the initial
problem of getting onto a new architecture. Admittedly, such a
bootstrapping approach has efficiency issues, but they can be dealt
with.

The more significant problems are the details of the hardware
presumptions I mentioned in my July 2001 comments, and the
architecture specific code for any new architecture. If it is
technically doable, it remains a significant financial item.

Admittedly, I have not done an indepth review of X86-64 in these
respects, my comments are meant in the general sense.

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com