[Info-vax] Open Source on OpenVMS - need some feedback

[Craig A. Berry]

On 1/2/15 1:56 PM, Steven Schweda wrote:
>     CRTL lacked standard shared memory functions, shmget() and
> friends.

My notes from attempting to enable the new support for these in Perl:

"They became available in ACRTL ECO V0100 on VMS v8.4, but aren't
quite ready for prime time yet. Specifically, shmget fails
unless IPC_CREAT is set in the third argument, but Perl has tests
that explicitly check that this is not necessary."

As of 8.4 update 9.0, this problem seems to have been fixed. I think
Mark Berryman ran into some other problems with these functions while
porting PostgreSQL, but I don't know the current status.

>     CRTL lacked standard UNIX sockets.

TCPIP 5.7 ECO 2 introduced support for an emulation of these but the
un.h header wasn't supplied until the latest CRTL ECO. In order to use
them, you have to set undocumented logical names (in the system table
for Pete's sake!) specifying the port numbers to use since they are
really just TCP/IP sockets under the hood. At the very least making the
implementation choose its own ephemeral ports would help.