[Info-vax] C99 updates to CRTL

[John Reagan]

On Wednesday, July 31, 2019 at 6:35:19 PM UTC-4, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2019-07-31 18:39:53 +0000, John Reagan said:
> 
> > On Wednesday, July 31, 2019 at 8:29:33 AM UTC-4, John E. Malmberg wrote:
> >> Can some documentation be provided on how a user could create a custom> 
> >> variant?
> >> 
> > Custom variant of what?
> 
> A custom variant of the C RTL.  The standard C RTL on OpenVMS is a bit 
> of a mess to use, bluntly.  Which means we've been replacing routines, 
> and wrapping routines.
> 

Yeah, like that will let 100s of different CRTLs spring into existence.  And you think Windows DLL hell or all the DECC$ feature logicals are problems...

The "wrappers" are just a form of Linux-like symbol preemption.  I get it, you want to slide in your own "whatever" and have all callers (including those inside the CRTL itself and anything else on the system that might call something like pipe()) use the user-provided form.  I don't see that happening.

We have a long list of changes/improvments to make.  We've been trying to find more resources to do it.  I've pushed for guidelines on letting people contribute code (not quite open source but the best we can do given our HPE agreement).