[Info-vax] OpenVMS Development Annoyances

[EVERHART at gce.name]

On Friday, February 8, 2019 at 11:08:34 AM UTC-5, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> Things about developing for OpenVMS that have annoyed me (again) this month:
> 
> There's no preferences file API.  Which means downloading a wad of code 
> from elsewhere, or rolling my own and supporting my own state-machine 
> parser and generator.  Or as happens far too often, explicit in-line 
> code that's less than wonderful to maintain and test and extend.   And 
> no, logical names are not a preferences API.
> 
> There's no job scheduler.  Yes, I'm aware of the add-ons.  No, batch 
> isn't a scheduler.  Batch was good enough and was useful for what we 
> were doing back in the early VAX era, but our needs have changed.
> 
> There's no DCL CLI interface to the lock manager.  Yes, I'm aware of 
> the add-ons.  And the system service API follows the usual OpenVMS 
> model of glorious flexibility at the cost of simplicity and ease of use 
> for common tasks.
> 
> Itemlists.  Did I mention itemlists?  I dislike itemlists.  Passing 
> arguments in hand-rolled data structures is far too reminiscent of 
> writing assembler code.  And about as tedious and as voluminous.  And 
> then there's the lack of a parser.  And the lack of language support.  
> Descriptor support is only marginally better than itemlist support, 
> outside of BASIC and whichever other languages where it's been 
> integrated. But itemlists haven't been integrated anywhere.
> 
> Logging.  Like storing preferences, there's no single way to do this, 
> and which means that everybody does it differently.  And there's bupkis 
> for collecting logging data and app crash data from multiple OpenVMS 
> servers.  Yes, I know from syslog, syslog-ng, and ilk.
> 
> On-going grumbles including inadequate development tooling and 
> inadequate compilers and crash-handling and patch-handling also all 
> apply.
> 
> The results of these limits for app developers?  App tooling that is a 
> fraction of what it can and should be, and apps that tend to be 
> brittle, and apps that take longer than they should to develop and to 
> test.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC