[Info-vax] BASIC compiler in the hobbyist distribution

[seasoned_geek]

On Thursday, May 28, 2015 at 7:05:41 PM UTC-5, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> 
> So you're suggesting that the AIX folks port from a Unix system to 
> OpenVMS?   The port starts out as pretty much a rewrite.  Without 
> access to the Unix compatibility tools and to the various open source 
> tools and libraries you've been objecting to, things get yet more 
> difficult.

Porting off AIX is going to be a rewrite no matter where they go. AIX is just different enough to make it brutal. Don't forget all of those companies still running OS/400 on their AS/400. They also are looking at a rewrite.

Those companies all have one thing in common, they need uptime and the x86 simply cannot deliver it.

> 
> A total of 1% of the Lenovo x86-64 servers from that survey had four 
> hours outages or more.
> 
> 99% of the Lenovo servers did better than that; had less downtime.
> 
> That's from what you linked, BTW.

Yes. It provides 0 stats on the countless crashes which take customers and orders with them but were under 4 hours. Go research the "abandoned shopping cart epidemic". On-line retailers trying to use these worthless pieces of doo-doo have been having them crash kicking off shoppers leaving billions of dollars in abandoned shopping carts each year.

> 
> The instructions are going to involve learning a wholly new platform, 
> and rewriting some or all of the not-COBOL and not-Fortran code 
> involved in the applications, and sorting out more than a few file and 
> database differences.  Which may well be a rewrite measured in decades, 
> for some folks.

It's __always__ a wholly new platform. Try moving from Ubuntu to OpenSuSE or Fedora. A tiny handful of things are the same. I have hopped distros more times than I can count. A tiny, miniscule, handful of things are the same. You can't even get the same packages on each distro. You find many are simply hacks using Alien or some other "package converter" which kindof-sortof works sometimes.