[Info-vax] C99 stuff (Re: The Road to V9.0)

[John Reagan]

On Sunday, June 9, 2019 at 9:01:34 AM UTC-4, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> On 6/8/19 9:48 AM, Robert A. Brooks wrote:
> 
> > While what we write is ours, what we write is useless without what 
> > DEC/CPQ/HP(E) has written.
> 
> That might be true if the only thing you were writing were core OS code.
> Obviously no one can boot VMS with only VSI-produced code.  It's more a
> question of what things you are doing that, if published under an open
> source license, might stimulate the community to do good things that
> would help the overall ecosystem.
> 
> If the changes needed to get clang/clang++ running on VMS were open
> source, then it would be easier for someone besides VSI to get
> Swift/Go/Rust/whatever up and running with a good example of how it's done.
> 

I put that into a different category.  We plan on pushing the LLVM changes back to LLVM's git repo.  Not clear yet on the clang changes as such platform-specific features might be a little too obscure for them to accept.  We have to provide build/test bots (which should be easy enough to provide).

You won't need any of our changes to clang/clang++ if you are just interested in porting over open source code.  No open source code has OpenVMS'isms buried in it.  However, if you want RTL name prefixing, etc., you'll need our edits.  Since we will be providing a full clang/clang++, getting it from VSI will be the easy way.  Nobody here is wanting to hack new stuff into clang?  

By the way, Rust is written in Rust, not C++.  You have to bootstrap from another platform. [I've spoken to Niko in person.]

> If the GEM-alike compiler interface were open source, then people using
> assorted ancient GEM-based compilers might have a chance of bringing
> their code forward to OpenVMS x64 (or whatever the marketing name will
> be).  PL/I comes to mind, but there may be others.

Nope.  Just PL/I.  While our G2L (GEM-to-LLVM) converter is indeed VSI written, it uses GEM headers (which are mostly HPE with a few VSI lines sprinkled in it).