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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/28/2019 12:01 PM, jaybraun2.0 at gmail.com wrote:
> 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
> 
> 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?

I doubt it.

Most already have external Linux systems, I doubt that
having the Linux in a VM on the VMS system would make
a big difference.

Obviously YMMV.

Arne