[Info-vax] September 6, 2016 - new Roadmap and State of the Port updates now on VSI website

[Craig A. Berry]

On 9/9/16 8:12 PM, David Froble wrote:

> I also think that if you're going to claim that you're running
> executables on VMS, then it should always be VMS services used to do
> things, not some language specific replacement of a VMS service.

That can be made to work when the services exist. For example, you can
probably do symlinks with enough hairy-looking RMS code in languages
other than C. But what about locale processing?

The issue is not really services, though, but rather data. If two
language run-times have identical code using LIB$GET_VM to allocate
memory but use zones to do it, how does each one know what zone the
other is using? The zone would have to be shared or passed around
somehow. Using native services doesn't magically make it all work.

And then there are different definitions for the same piece of data,
such as a 32-bit time_t and a 64-bit time_t. Many things are better and
simpler if a new compiler could depend on always having the latter. But
then the modules it generates can't be linked to modules created by the
old compiler. We already have this problem with the various definitions
of the stat structure.