[Info-vax] New first boot contest ?, was: Re: Fortran

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 19:18:06 UTC, John Reagan  wrote:
> On Wednesday, December 5, 2018 at 1:46:59 PM UTC-5, Simon Clubley wrote:
> > On 2018-12-05, John Reagan  wrote:
> > > Not to worry.  Under no circumstances would we add /STANDARD=VAXC to
> > > clang. That would be insanity.  We're more likely to recode our Macro32
> > > into JavaScript and PHP.
> > >
> > 
> > :-)
> > 
> > > I'm starting with the list of additions we made to the Intel C++ compiler
> > > on Itanium (which is already much smaller than C++ in Alpha) and cutting
> > > from there.  I'll finish up the spec after the holidays and first boot. 
> >                                                  ^^^^^^^^     ^^^^^^^^^^
> > > I'll post it then in a new thread for what will surely be a lively
> > > discussion.
> > 
> > Oh, I don't think that's the lively discussion you have just started. :-)
> > 
> > Are VSI planning on running a new first boot contest, given how close
> > it now appears to be ?
> > 
> > Simon.
> > 
> > -- 
> > Simon Clubley, 
> > Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world
> 
> All I said (or implied) is that I have some vacation to use up later this month, I have other things to do (both work and personal), and my first priority is for Macro-32 bugs that are found as part of the first boot debugging.  My latest one was for "SOBGEQ (SP), 1$".  I accidentally decremented the stack pointer (the %rsp register) and not the top of the stack as intended. 
> 
> I did not imply that first boot would be before or after any holiday (nor did I specify the holiday :) )
> 
> I have not heard anything about re-opening the contest, etc.  Clair's posts showing additional progress provide plenty of detail.

Clair's post (and yours) provides plenty of detail to those of us that 
follow the dark corners of comp.os.vms 

It led to me wandering over to the VSI website, which I hadn't 
done for a while.

I was pleasantly surprised to see, on the main page, that Ray 
Turner (long time VMS Ambassador in the UK) has been a VSI 
employee since November.

I was surprised in a different way to see the website section 
headed "SPOTLIGHT: Status of OpenVMS x86 Port",
says:
"Latest update: Proof Point 3 achieved!"

It then links to http://vmssoftware.com/updates_port.html
which says something along the lines of:
Proof Point 5: Display the system identification banner, while processing through the initialization code. 
Proof Point 4: Display early loaded image list.

Proof Points 4 and 5 are shown as being achieved on 14 Sep 2018.


Proof Point 3 ("Executed the first system service call") was dated 
4 Aug 2018.

Colour me puzzled. Accurate information is very welcome :)