[Info-vax] Help wanted : Porting code from Linux to VMS

[jaybraun2.0 at gmail.com]

On Monday, January 28, 2019 at 8:49:04 AM UTC-8, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 1/27/2019 10:34 PM, jaybraun2.0 at gmail.com wrote:
> > I'm entering this discussion a bit late, but I do have a high-level
> > question.  I have ported applications from OpenVMS to Linux, but was
> > surprised that someone is going in the opposite direction.  What is
> > the investment that your organization wishes to retain?  Is it the
> > Itanium hardware?  Perhaps you have a product for which it is
> > advantageous to support OpenVMS?
> 
> Linux -> VMS is not that unusual.
> 
> But the typical context is:
> * There is one or more primary applications running
>    on VMS - something business critical
> * Either there is no plans to migrate off VMS or
>    the plans are far out in the future
> * There is a need to get one or more supporting
>    applications that exists for Linux running on
>    VMS to add value to the primary application(s)
> * Building the Linux C/C++ code on VMS turns out to be
>    very difficult:
>    - VMS compilers are behind current language standards
>    - often the *nix build processes uses some tools that
>      has not yet been ported to VMS
>    - code uses *nix specific features with no obvious
>      VMS counterpart
> 
> Arne

Theoretically, if an OpenVMS system could be used as a virtualization host, with a Linux guest, might some of these use cases be easier to solve?