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

[John Reagan]

On Wednesday, December 5, 2018 at 2:54:20 PM UTC-5, johnwa... at yahoo.co.uk wrote:
> 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 :)

I think PP #3 was just Camiel testing out the call gate SS# dispatch in an artificial test harness.  The later proof points and current code is actually doing real system routine calls.