[Info-vax] VMS port to x86

[JKB]

Le Thu, 24 May 2012 02:59:48 -0400,
JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> écrivait :
> Neil Rieck wrote:
>
>> If I were HP, I'd have the skunk-works in India working on an x86 port
>> right now.
>
> Thyey tried this a few years ago but those skunkworks which also
> involved HP-UX were killed because moving HP=UX to x86 would be too much
> of an effort.
>
> With regards to running VMS in emulation. VAX-VMS is over 10 years old
> at 7.3. Not developped anymore. And Alpha/IA64 is barely being
> maintained/developped anymore. About the only commitment from HP is to
> make it run on the upcoming Poulson and Kittson platforms.
>
> So even if you can continue to run VMS on emulated environments, you are
> still limited to whatever VMS version and software are available.

	Right. I think it's really time to know if we want to assist to VMS
	death or if we want to do somethink to keep VMS alive. Even if VMS
	is a fabulous OS, its design has to be changed. A long time ago, Dec
	has started to port VMS on a microkernel (VMS-O-Mach) and I'm sure
	that if VMS has today still future, it has to be rewritten over a
	microkernel. It's time to drop Bliss and some strange languages to
	write VMS as servers (written in C, ADA or all language you want)
	on top of a real microkernel (not Mach, but L4 for example).

	But VMS is dying also as porting Unix application to VMS is not
	simple. If you want to propose a lot of softwares, you cannot ignore
	Unix and VMS should have a real POSIX/SysV libc like newlib.

	Regards,

	JKB

-- 
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