[Info-vax] Development Tooling (was: Re: Opportunity for VSI?)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-12-16 21:59:08 +0000, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply said:

> I remember when people who didn't know VMS at all wanted to work on my 
> machine because the compilers were better.  Perhaps VSI can revive that 
> tradition.

You would like VSI to revive the tradition of random folks that want to 
work on your machine?  Um, okay.

As you're almost certainly referencing compilers there, that's not been 
a product differentiator in recent years, and VSI will be using the 
LLVM tool chain with the older front-ends for source compatibility on 
x86-64  And the LLVM diagnostics are at least competitive with the 
OpenVMS compilers.  If not better.  When combined with IDE integration, 
what's available is far beyond LSEDIT.  With a native LLVM port, 
there's room to see other programming languages arrive on OpenVMS, too.

As for developer tooling, the scope and scale of the tooling and 
frameworks available for and increasingly expected by developers is 
well beyond the compilers.  I'd certainly like to see VSI provide an 
IDE for OpenVMS.  One far beyond LSEDIT.  But implementing a bespoke 
and feature-competitive IDE project for OpenVMS is very likely a 
project larger than the entirety of VSI.  As would be a new and bespoke 
and feature-competitive VSI compiler chain, were that even remotely a 
salable product differentiation.  And it's not.

You've indicated you're an EDT user.  Go try LSEDIT.  See how that 
changes your approach to source code development.  The keypad is that 
of EDT (or EDT keypad can be selected), so what's new is the command 
line interface in the editor, and a few shortcuts such as ^F and ^G in 
the diagnostic review window after a COMPILE /REVIEW command.


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