[Info-vax] OS specific APIs, was: Re: September 6, 2016 - new Roadmap and State of the Port updates now on VSI website

[Kerry Main]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Info-vax [mailto:info-vax-bounces at rbnsn.com] On
> Behalf Of Simon Clubley via Info-vax
> Sent: 10-Sep-16 10:29 AM
> To: info-vax at rbnsn.com
> Cc: Simon Clubley
> <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP>
> Subject: [Info-vax] OS specific APIs, was: Re: September
6,
> 2016 - new Roadmap and State of the Port updates now
> on VSI website
> 
> On 2016-09-10, David Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Personal opinion.
> >
> > I think that when you implement an environment on top
> of another environment,
> > then you're no longer really running executables under
> the lower (not sure what
> > term) environment.  In this case, if special stuff is
> implemented in C, then by
> > using it you're no longer running on VMS.
> >
> 
> And what if that special stuff is needed to get code
> written to run under
> another operating system running on VMS as well ?
> 
> > 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.
> >
> 
> So IOW, what you are saying is that any code imported
> from, say, Unix
> should be re-written to use VMS specific APIs instead
and
> that people
> should go to the effort of maintaining a seperate VMS
> version of the
> code ?
> 
> Also how would you handle new versions of the main
> code base; would
> those same people have to manually import changes in
> the main version
> of the code into the VMS specific version ?
> 
> Good luck with that... :-)
> 
> Simon.

Is this not the decades old argument about the trade-offs
associated with creating a portable application vs.
optimizing an app for max performance on a specific OS
platform? 

It's not specific to OpenVMS. You would also have
compatibility issues if you wanted to optimize an open
source application to take advantage of Solaris specific
libraries / calls /containers to perhaps maximize the app
performance on one of the latest SPARC systems.

It depends on what your priorities are.

Regards,

Kerry Main
Kerry dot main at starkgaming dot com