[Info-vax] Gartner report on VMS future.

[Richard B. Gilbert]

Michael Kraemer wrote:
> ChaosLess schrieb:
> 
>>
>> no secrets other than tight programming, lots of hard work writing
>> code that we keep improving.  and reworking parts of the libraries as
>> technology improves on unix's for it...  how we did async programming
>> in 1990 didn't work well for async qio and ast delivery was a
>> challenge, just like stack unwinding...  reworking core components,
>> adding scalable threading, and LOTS of testsuite programs :-)
> 
> well, ISTR people here have claimed that AST's would be impossible
> on any system other than VMS.
> 

Well, an AST is nothing more nor less than an interrupt.  It's used for 
things like announcing I/O completion.  If you do your I/O in a language 
like Fortran, the I/O package handles them for you and you don't even 
need to know they exist.  If you use $QIO you may wish to use ASTs.

Other systems call it something else and implementation details will vary.