[Info-vax] Programming languages on VMS

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-01-24 02:36:08 +0000, Craig A. Berry said:

> On 1/23/18 10:06 AM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> On 2018-01-23 13:26:37 +0000, Craig A. Berry said:
> 
>>> Among those not mentioned, there is Lua (vsi-i64vms-lua-v0502-3-1 is 
>>> available now) and Perl. I don't expect "porting" Perl to involve much 
>>> more than tinkering with how the configuration script deals with 
>>> architecture names.
>> 
>> Lua 5.3.4 is current.
>> 
>> The Perl kit isn't current, either.
> 
> The VSI Perl kit may not be completely current, but most 
> vendor-provided distributions are not much, if any, newer. My kits are 
> still available at:
> 
> <https://sourceforge.net/projects/vmsperlkit/files/?source=navbar>
> 
> and are not far behind current (though not completely up-to-date as of 
> this writing). I keep hoping for a way to produce signed kits but so 
> far I don't think there's anything available.

Part of my recent "entertainment" is involving getting basic CPAN 
sequences to work.    TLS builds are falling over, too.  That's on 
5.24.2 PCSI, and on fetched 5.26.1 stable.   Could well be operator 
error and quite possibly is, or could be something with the most recent 
releases.  (I'm getting SSL errors that I know how to fix, secondary to 
the "new" SSL1 logical names.

I'd hope VSI can toss some licenses and particularly some money to help 
folks — yourself and others, if and as interested — deal with this 
stuff for the various languages, or to staff up their own VSI efforts 
to update the languages.

That's all also fodder that might encourage VSI to release hobbyist 
licenses, too.  They're forked from HPE OpenVMS, and the differences 
are just starting to accumulate.

>> Somebody really needs to be testing "head" for Lua, Perl and Python and 
>> the rest, and I don't think that's happening with any of the community 
>> programming language.
> 
> I build "blead," the development branch of Perl, several times a week 
> and patch whatever build and test failures I can manage, which isn't 
> 100% but is usually pretty close.

Which operating system?  HPE V8.4 on Alpha and Itanium?  Or VSI V8.4-2+ 
on Alpha and Itanium?

>> And I'm routinely seeing breakage.
> 
> I also do attempt to fix bugs in Perl if you happen to notice any. Most 
> of the breakage I see stems from problems with the current CRTL, though 
> our attempts to work with or around the CRTL also cause trouble 
> sometimes.

My happy place includes visions of the current C RTL enjoying a very 
pleasant and well-deserved retirement fading slowly into its eventual 
deprecation, while we migrate our C apps to a replacement during the 
transition.   Migrating to something built from the best of the CRTL 
bits and hunks of libclang, or whatever.   The increasing layers of 
internal C RTL and grafted-on app-level compatibility are only causing 
more and more problems.  And that crosses the CRTL and parts of the I/O 
subsystem.  But that's a larger and more disruptive project than VSI is 
probably staffed for, so my C code unfortunately continues to accrete 
debt.




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