[Info-vax] VMS and the embedded world, was: Re: PowerX Roadmap - Extended beyond 2020

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <5bfd6b8e-d51b-4297-a367-992650bf50e9 at googlegroups.com>,
clairgrant71 at gmail.com writes: 

> This was all true years ago but after porting to Alpha and especially to
> Itanium, architecture-specific knowledge is in very few places and
> extremely little of the OS is aware of architecture and that is
> centralized. At this point it is not so much the design of VMS that
> makes it time consuming to port, it is the fact that it was written in
> VAX assembler and BLISS and uses the GEM code generator. (Yes, we have
> explored converting to C three times and rejected that approach each
> time). 

I remember a while back when some bugs showed up in VMS MAIL and it
turned out that they were introduced when MAIL was converted from BLISS
to C.  That doesn't put the blame on C, of course, but raises the
question whether a port to another language is worth the risks. 
(Personally, I think that many languages are more readable than C, and 
as a result I would certainly write better code in languages other than 
C.  On the other hand, of course, a good Fortran programmer can write 
Fortran in any language.)