[Info-vax] Reimplementing VMS, was: Re: HP adds OpenVMS Mature Product Support beyond the end of Standard Support

[John Reagan]

On Monday, February 3, 2014 2:45:33 PM UTC-5, johnwa... at yahoo.co.uk wrote:

> 
> John Reagan, on the other hand, I do take as definitive. He also has
> a couple of posts in that thread, about GEM on x86, and what it could
> (and mostly could not) do.
> 

I've been resisting jumping back in.  I only have so many blood pressure pills left, but since John mentioned my name...

To recap from various posts over the years:

BLISS for x86-32.  A subset of BLISS & GEM that compiles the necessary BLISS, GEM, and Visual Fortran sources, to get the Visual Fortran product.  Also provided to Oracle in some fashion for their analysis/study/whatever (talk to them on how they actually used it).  GEM for x86-32 used only 32-bit registers, used the Windows calling standard, used the Windows debug table format, used the Windows object file format.  Probably got most of the whole BLISS language, but the GEM target only implemented just those code patterns used by BLISS and Fortran.  For example, none of the COBOL packed decimal, Pascal VARYING OF CHAR, BASIC CLASS_D string support, etc. were done.  Those code patterns were empty and contained an "assert".

Unless somebody cloned the CMS libraries without my knowledge, there has never been a Macro-32 compiler that would generate a single 8086/x86-32/whatever instruction.

Any "study" or "analysis" would have been at a higher "what if" level to "make a list of the areas that might be impacted by a port and what work would need to be done".