[Info-vax] [OT] Wirth style languages, was: Re: Obscure Ada compiler vendors?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2013-04-04 15:16:49 +0000, Craig A. Berry said:

> If one were to rewrite VMS from scratch (which I still think is a crazy
> idea as long as there is any possibility of maintaining the existing
> code base), some combination of Haskell and C or Go would probably be
> the current equivalents of BLISS and MACRO.

I'd tend to expect C99/C11 with extensions or with something akin to 
Objective C, maybe subset C++, with Go or Lua or Python for some tasks.

It's unlikely to be selected, but maybe Rust <http://www.rust-lang.org> 
or analogous would be looked at, if you're willing to be on the 
bleeding edge.  The bleeding edge is a risky spot to be with a project 
as big and as long-lived as an operating system, as you can end up with 
your own Bliss and tool chain, if Rust or whatever other AD programming 
language you choose doesn't gain wider traction, and disappears.   
There's a debate here: <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4009>

As good as it is, Haskell wouldn't be at the top of my list for an 
operating system.  Same with Scala or Clojure.  Good languages both, 
but you probably don't want the JVM underneath an operating system, if 
you can avoid it.

Rewriting all of OpenVMS?  That'd lead me to this state: 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L6i5AwVAbs>.   Even if you were to be 
successful with a rewrite, once you're done with that very substantial 
and years-long effort and investment, you would have something 
approximating current-day VMS.  Not the features and functions that 
folks would would want and would expect after all those years.   If 
you're aimed at application compatibility (one of many choices and 
trade-offs you'll be forced to make!), then rehosting on Mach 
<http://www.sture.ch/vms/Usenix_VMS-on-Mach.pdf> or rebuilding the 
kernel would likely be discouraged or disallowed.  The rest of the 
market is not standing still here, and you're talking about a project 
that took three or five years last time (Alpha to Itanium) for a fairly 
straight port with very few changes, and with an engineering team that 
was very familiar with VMS assigned to the effort full-time.   ~Thirty 
million lines of Bliss and C and Macro32 is a huge project to 
reconstitutue.

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