[Info-vax] Some questions on software for VMS 7.3 VAX

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On Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:15:14 +0100
hb via Info-vax <info-vax at rbnsn.com> wrote:

> The corruption seems to be a wrong SP caused by inlining a function
> which in turn uses alloca() to make room for a filename on the stack. So
> the SP is roughly off by the length of that name. Unfortunately I can't
> reproduce it with a small test program. But as far as I understand the
> machine listing, the problem shows there.

Great work.

> Using /nooptimize turns inlining off and turns the problem down. I
> changed the source to use #pragma noinline for that function and that
> avoids the problem as well - and still optimizes everything else; how
> good is now a different question.

It's painfully slow. Startup takes forever, using it just as long. Even
paging through a file reminds me of a serial console. You can see the
screen painting from top to bottom. If I was running it on a VT100 I would
feel a lot better ;-) 

> I made a new binary kit: https://www.sendspace.com/file/2qdd4v

Thank you.

> The zip file is compressed with -1 for faster processing, so it is about
> 10% bigger than the first kit.

The less compression the better. The net is faster than my emulated system.

> I patched the GNU_STARTUP.COM to define BLD_ROOT relative to where
> GNU_STARTUP.COM is: if that works as expected you no longer need to
> define (or adjust the definition of) BLD_ROOT.

It works fine if you leave the local directory name as is. Obviously they
were trying to create a similar path structure as in UNIX. If you rename
the local.dir to anything else the startup breaks again. I would like to
get the intermediate directory out of the picture and have everything under
a directory called emacs-21.2. I'll try to do that at some point.

> I'm sure you let me know if there are problems :-)

Going through it all the normal features seem to work. SLOWLY. It's kinda
disappointing it runs so badly on this system but I guess I should have
expected that. Something so horribly bloated was not around in the VAX days.

Thank you very much for doing this. You really should make it available for
people since AFAIK there is no binary port available anywhere. I don't have
any real VAX hardware so I have no idea where the problem is. The PC host
I'm running this on is a fast machine but the emulated system still feels
sluggish when you try to do more than one thing at a time. I suspect the
emulator is largely to blame for the performance issues including Emacs but
I have no way to know for sure. I realize VAX boxes weren't screamers
either but getting all those layers out of the way would probably help.

Thanks again and I'm impressed by your abilities and generosity.

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