[Info-vax] Moving away from OpenVMS

[Bob Koehler]

In article <SOOdnWdNnfJGayHSnZ2dnUVZ_t2dnZ2d at insightbb.com>, "John Reagan" <johnrreagan at earthlink.net> writes:
> 
> Again, don't forget that you need BLISS and C just for the OS and you'll 
> want all the rest of the compilers for the customer base.  GEM's old x86 
> target was 32-bit only, just did the things that Visual Fortran required, 
> and generated Windows object files and Windows debugging info.  All of that 
> would need fixing.  And switching to some other code generator (gcc, LLVM, 
> open64) might work but I'd have to think about it.

   I don't see generating compilers for IA32 as any more difficult than
   generating compilers for Alpha or IA64.  There are plenty of examples
   of code generators for IA32 (and IA32-64).
 
> As I've mention before, the smaller register set (as compared to Itanium and 
> Alpha) causes more rework for facilities like RMS that currently use lots of 
> GLOBAL REGISTERs to pass around implicit arguments between routines.

   GLOBAL REGISTERS can be replaced with ordinary variables.  VAXen didn't 
   have all those registers and it survived.  There may be a minor
   performance hit.