[Info-vax] Free Pascal for VMS ?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-05-07 16:53:41 +0000, Simon Clubley said:

> On 2018-05-07, John Reagan <xyzzy1959 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Why not the VSI Pascal compiler? (Other than it not being free or open source?)
> 
> My primary interest here is not VMS but that would have been a nice bonus.
> 
> I've been looking for alternatives to C which are supported on a wide 
> range of targets, including bare metal targets.

Certainly not Pascal, but here's an alternative to C that's expressly 
intended for this sort of thing and particularly with memory safety, 
that's available for various common platforms including 
cross-compilation for embedded, and that's also designed to easily 
interoperate with C code where that's necessary...

https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/
https://www.redox-os.org
http://www.randomhacks.net/bare-metal-rust/
https://forge.rust-lang.org/platform-support.html
https://github.com/Aaronepower/rust/blob/master/RELEASES.md



thread errata...

Given my experience with UCSD p-system from an aeon or three ago, I'd 
not consider it for bare-metal applications.  I'm sure it's much 
improved in the intervening aeons as it was quite flaky and unstable 
way back then, but the necessity for the p-Code interpreter usually 
wouldn't be something I'd want to use for embedded and bare-metal and 
cross-compilation applications.  Once I've enough code running on the 
target platform, then something akin to the p-System, JVM or such might 
be applicable.

As for those wondering why Free Pascal might be more interesting than 
the existing OpenVMS implementation, have a look at the difference in 
features: https://freepascal.org/docs-html/ref/ref.html  Among other 
differences, OpenVMS Pascal hasn't yet added object-oriented 
programming support.   Wouldn't surprise me to find that some future 
version of Pascal for OpenVMS either incorporates some of the features 
from Free Pascal, Delphi and ilk, though that's some years into the 
future and long after the completion of the OpenVMS x86-64 port.  Or 
maybe Free Pascal gets ported to OpenVMS x86-64.  Most of the 
"traditional" OpenVMS programming languages and the associated and 
underlying OpenVMS APIs and the vendors' development tools haven't 
moved forward substantially in ~twenty years.  Yes, VSI does aim to 
change that.


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