[Info-vax] Modern software development for VMS, was: Re: source control and semantics (Re: Why so much Unix envy?)

[Simon Clubley]

On 2014-09-13, johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk <johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> So is there a way forward for modern software development on VMS then?
>

Yes. Treat VMS as a cross compiler target and do the actual development
on (say) a Linux desktop.

> On the one hand there's the Eclipse (and friends) fan club (which is
> fine by me) but over in another thread recently the received wisdom
> is that the prospects for a revived "VMS desktop" are limited.
>
> Is VMS sw development therefore staying in (retreating to?) the
> character-cell era, or is there some miracle which allows the
> deployment of some subset of modern/GUI sw tools on VMS even in
> the absence of a plausible complete desktop?
>

_On_ VMS, no. _For_ VMS, yes.

ACT got their gcc Ada compiler working on VMS by first creating a
cross compiler on Linux. When I was trying to duplicate ACT's VMS
port of gcc using the public gcc kits (ACT have their own private
gcc tree) I got as far as using a cross compiler running on Linux
(the target triplet was alpha-dec-vms IIRC) to build some C programs
to run on VMS and which ran ok on Eisner.

With that setup (and assuming a public gcc kit which actually works
on VMS) then many of the usual embedded/cross compiler development
environments become available for VMS development and you can choose
whichever one you want.

Note: the one thing I never tried to look at with my experiments
however was the remote debugging of programs running on VMS.

However, having said that, the cross compiler approach does show
real potential.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world