[Info-vax] Making the CRTL version dependency information useful

[Craig A. Berry]

On 1/13/18 11:40 AM, John E. Malmberg wrote:
> On 1/13/2018 10:41 AM, Chris Scheers wrote:
>> Craig A. Berry wrote:
>>>
>>> Many caveats and porting gotchas remain. For the table labeled "All
>>> OpenVMS Versions" I assumed V4.0 because I think that might be around
>>> the time a semi-viable CRTL came along, and if you really care about
>>> anything pre-7.x then you need a great deal more help than I can give
>>> you (for many reasons). Bu if someone knows a better definition of "all"
>>> than V4.0, please say so.
>>
>> IIRC, VAXCRTL (and ADARTL) were added to the base VMS release in VMS 
>> V4.2.
>>
>> To get VAXCRTL on earlier versions, you had to install the compiler.
>>
> 
> The CRTL help is for the DECC runtime that was introduced with VAX/VMS 
> 6.0 and Alpha/VMS 1.0.
> 
> That CRTL was backported to 5.5-2 (I do not know about earlier) and 
> packaged with the DEC C compiler to VAX with a attributable CRTL kit 
> that can be supplied with programs.
> 
> So the "All OpenVMS" versions would refer to 5.5-2 and later.

Thanks, that makes sense.

> The GCC/VAX compiler can also use the DECC CRTL on those versions to get 
> better results than using the VAXCRTL.
> 
> And since I have an emulated VAX running, I still attempt to build VAX 
> kits for projects.

There are a handful of conversion functions that take quadwords that are
Alpha and Itanium only and generally have "ll" or "q" in the name, there
is the sigstack function that is VAX only, and then there are the ones
with "32" or "64" at end that are Alpha and Itanium only -- these are
the only cases where the version number itself is not enough to give you
platform support. One could add more columns to the output of my script
if indicating these cases is considered important.