[Info-vax] Platform Migrations (was: Re: Internationalization)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-12-29 22:22:45 +0000, Arne Vajhj said:

> On 12/29/2018 4:46 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> And as the character encoding... The lack of UTF-8 is limiting.  As is 
>> the lack of flagging on the descriptors.  I have to track my own string 
>> encoding.
>> 
>> VAX, Alpha or Itanium are unlikely to see any work on UTF-8, and 
>> certainly not until well after the x86-64 port and a pile or three of 
>> other work is completed.
> 
> But for some things (user mode things like UTF-8 support) wouldn't it 
> be easier to make changes to both x86-64 and Itanium (and maybe Alpha) 
> instead of making them x86-64 only?

Easier in some ways?  Sure.  Definitely.  In others?  Implementing for 
and testing code across multiple architectures adds incremental effort 
and costs and time.  Not the least of which is new releases of OpenVMS 
for the platforms.

And ponder why this support might or might not be appropriate, too.  
I've had a working assumption that new Itanium HPE Integrity i6 server 
availability will end in 2020, though the end of new sales has not been 
officially announced.  In ~2025 or whatever timeframe this hypothetical 
UTF-8 work might eventually be completed, are we really going to be 
expecting very much of then-old Itanium servers?  And would this and 
other architectural back-ports really serve to reduce the incremental 
sales value of OpenVMS on x86-64?  Or will VSI be working on Intel and 
x86-64 changes, on adding support for SGX and MKTME and follow-ons, and 
on peripheral support?   Or will VSI be pondering a port to Arm and 
AArch64?

Seeing a hard fork akin to what happened with VAX to Alpha would not 
particularly surprise me, with the eventual advent of OpenVMS x86-64 
native builds rather than the current cross-builds.  (There's at least 
one CMS export git import tool around, too.)

This support-old-stuff-forever approach just isn't as viable as it once 
was, and for various reasons.  And I'd suspect that VSI would really 
like to keep support for older releases and older hardware to five 
years.







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