[Info-vax] Gartner report on VMS future.

[John Wallace]

On Sep 21, 12:35 am, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber... at comcast.net>
wrote:
> 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.

ASTs and interrupts are about as similar as knives and screwdrivers.
You don't really want to use one where you really wanted the other one.