[Info-vax] compile for VAX 8650 system

[David Froble]

Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2016-06-07, imniklason at gmail.com <imniklason at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tuesday, June 7, 2016 at 2:00:24 PM UTC-6, Bob Gezelter wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, June 7, 2016 at 2:20:47 PM UTC-4, imnik... at gmail.com wrote:
>>>> The company I work for currently has a contract to support code running on a VAX 8650 system, we need to find some way to compile Ada, c, and assembly (not sure exactly which versions, can find out if necessary) for the VAX 8650 system. We have looked into emulation, acquiring our own VAX 8650 system, and using a cross compiler, but so far we have not had any luck with any of these approaches. I am writing this to see if any of you fine folks have any suggestions as to how we might proceed.
>>> imnik,
>>>
>>> As has been said, any reasonable real or emulated VAX environment should suffice to run OpenVMS compiles. The devil will be in getting the details correct.
>>>
>>> As has been suggested, a more detailed review of the issues would lead to clarity. If the appropriate expertise is not available in-house, getting outside help would also be a sound course of action (Disclosure: We provide consulting services.).
>>>
>>> - Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com
>> Thank you everyone for all of the replies. I do not have answers to
>> many of your questions, and I have realized that I need to be a bit
>> more well versed in this subject before I can really give you guys the
>> information you need to be of help. I will look more into getting an
>> emulator running as it seems that is a universal piece of advice
>> common to all of you. I feel like I have a much better idea of how to
>> proceed than I did before I made this post.
>>
> 
> Some of the initial responses (including my own) were based on the
> assumption you were running VMS on the VAX 8650 system instead of,
> as it turns out, VAXELN and hence the original assumption was that
> you wanted to setup VMS on a development box as a clone of your
> production box.
> 
> Given that you are instead actually running VAXELN on the target box,
> the question should be what VAX hardware was used to develop your
> VAXELN application originally as that's the hardware you need to
> emulate.
> 
> Hopefully, you still have the licences and media from the original
> VAX development system around and hopefully the licences allow you
> to recreate the original development system in an emulator.
> 
> The ideal solution would be if someone made a standalone backup of
> the original development system on a media format which is restorable,
> either directly or indirectly, into your emulator.
> 
> Simon.
> 

I guess the questions I have may or may not be relevant.

1) Did the OPs company sign a contract to do something without knowing if they 
actually could?

2) I'd think VMS and the VAXELN toolkit might be the easy part.  Where are the 
sources for the application?  And if that's available, wouldn't the development 
environment be in the same place?