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

[JF Mezei]

Neil Rieck wrote:

> As I have mentioned to others privately, if DEC would have listened to
> Cutler and rewritten VMS in C, then porting VMS to Alpha, Itanium and
> anything else would already have saved them tons of money.


I disagree with this. When DEC ported VMS to Alpha, it wasn't the
compilers that cost it money, it was the fact that they went with a
split code base.

When they ported from Alpha to that IA64 thing, they decided to do it
right and make the code more portable with a single code base. Once that
work is done, porting to another platform becomes much easier.

It is my understanding that all they need is a native assembler for the
really deep down stuff, MACRO compiler, C, and BLISS. Anything else ?  I
think that they ported the last bits written in PL1 to something else,
right ?