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

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-01-28 17:01:17 +0000, jaybraun2.0 at gmail.com said:

> 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?

Other than the network speed improvements inherent with better locality 
of the end-points, there's little difference between and OpenVMS guest 
and a Linux guest co-resident, and a network among OpenVMS and Linux 
servers running on separate server hardware.  Not without 
paravirtualization assists added into the virtualization environments.  
And tweaking the apps to use those paravirtualized paths, if/as/when 
necessary.  Or tweaking the apps to use one of various RPCs.

If you're pondering OpenVMS theoretically running as the virtual 
machine and configured with Linux guests, then that's just not 
happening any time soon.  If ever.  And that still doesn't provide 
particular benefits, short of adding paravirtualization assists.

And as for alternatives to virtualization, OpenVMS lacks any sort of 
FUSE support, nor support for user-mode Linux, nor Wasm.  Which means 
you're maybe still headed toward running via Wasm here, and that's a 
ways off in the OpenVMS universe.  And Wasm still involves getting the 
app data transferred between the apps and the app hosts.

So... no.

We're still going to occasionally be porting Linux and BSD Unix apps 
onto OpenVMS.  And occasionally RPC'ing or REST'ing or otherwise 
wrapping some apps.  Which then gets to the grumblings about OpenVMS 
and the rather sorry start of C and the CRTL, and of SSIO, and of C++ 
support, and VSI has certainly been made aware of much of that.  
Getting  LLVM and Clang available on OpenVMS x86-64 will help 
substantially, both with the C and C++ environments provided by Clang, 
and with the potential for ports of various other languages that are 
based on LLVM.

Wasm, et al:

https://github.com/rossberg/wasm-c-api
https://github.com/rianhunter/wasmjit
https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten
https://tbfleming.github.io/cib/
https://bellard.org/jslinux/
https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-workers-wasm-demo
https://github.com/rhysd/vim.wasm


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