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

[David Froble]

Keith Parris wrote:
> On 4/4/2013 11:01 AM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> 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.
> ...
>> 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
>> reconstitute.
> 
> By this logic, the GNU project and Linux could never have caught up 
> with, much less surpassed or exceeded, UNIX capabilities.

Indeed!

Extend the logic far enough and perhaps we never should have left the 
caves ....

However, the facts still are, thirty million lines of code is 
substantial.  No way around that.  Just tossing it isn't a small step, 
more like stepping off a cliff.

But at this time, it's not even in hand to be tossed ....

Of more concern to me is VMS (as far as I know) is more of a monolith, 
with lots of complexity and inter-relationships.  Is this reality?  Any 
changes can have far reaching ramafications.  Is this the best way to 
put an OS together?  I sure don't know.  But I read about micro-kernels, 
and that path has advocates.

I'd think that a more modular approach might avoid some issues that now 
might be a problem in VMS.  Don't really know.  I also don't know if a 
more modular approach might be very detrimental in some ways, such as 
performance.