[Info-vax] The future of Ada on VMS

[Scott Dorsey]

Bob Koehler <koehler at eisner.nospam.decuserve.org> wrote:
>In article <pdvvmp$ht0$2 at dont-email.me>, "John E. Malmberg" <wb8tyw at qsl.net_work> writes:
>> 
>> How different will be Linux x86 elf from VMS x86 elf?

The VMS executable format is very much unlike ELF, and I don't see that
changing with the port to x86. 
 
>> What would it take to be able to compile/link on Linux and run on VMS/x86?
>
>   That very much depends on how many OS dependencies they can hide in
>   the RTL.
>
>   And whether the code has any explicit calls to VMS specific APIs.

Once you have a compiler with a backend that will generate the VMS executable
instead of an ELF executable, it should be no problem to build that compiler
on Linux or VMS or whatever other OS you want to build it on.

But yes, you'll likely need to write some OS-specific libraries.  How big a
deal that is depends a lot on what language it is.  Writing the standard 
libraries for a C compiler is not such a big deal.  For Ada it might be.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."