[Info-vax] Programming languages on VMS

[Craig A. Berry]

On 1/24/18 3:19 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2018-01-24 02:36:08 +0000, Craig A. Berry said:

> 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.

CPAN is wonderful, but it has something like 25,000 modules, and it's
completely hit or miss what will work in a given environment. Many work
just fine on VMS. Some need trivial changes to the build procedures to
work. Others would need massive porting effort. There is no general
answer to "Why doesn't CPAN module X work on VMS?"

Net::SSLeay is a tricky one because it attempts to detect where your
OpenSSL libraries are. At one time I had the VMS-specific configuration
bits working to take a home-grown build of OpenSSL first, then the HP
SSL kit if present. That needs updating for SSL1, which I started to
look into once, but realized I didn't know if the VSI SSL1 kits put
things in the same place(s) as the HPE SSL1 kits and at the time I did
not have access to any VSI VMS systems; I do now and will try to revisit
this soonish.

> 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?

Mostly v8.4 Itanium, HPE until recently and now VSI 8.4-2. I build on
Alpha far less frequently as it takes approximately forever on my
XP1000. There are still few if any differences between Alpha and IA64
and VSI and HPE as far as what works for the Perl build. That will
change big-time with v8.5 and v9.0 and x86_64 thrown into the mix.
Latent (and mostly untested recently) support for v7.3-2 is the first
thing that will get tossed overboard and I'll be looking for other
things to reduce the M by N matrix of combinations that need explicit
support in the code and (hopefully) testing.