[Info-vax] OpenVMS Development Annoyances

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-05-07 18:14:30 +0000, Dave Froble said:

> On 5/7/2019 1:49 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> 
>> https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/715/
> 
> Even with the item lists and the QIO interface, I find socket 
> communications rather simple.  Mostly.

The socket API worked pretty well for static links and cleartext 
traffic, but we're not headed that way.

Watch the first ~ten minutes of the video linked above for a discussion 
of some of the "fun" with sockets, even if you're not inclined to watch 
the rest of the presentation.

Mobile devices, network proxies, multipath TCP (MPTCP), DNS, TLS & 
DTLS, IPv6, path-costing & prioritization, push notifications, there's 
more going on now.

> Then there is the midden heap called HP TCP/IP.

It's all Multinet sooner or later, and not the HPE package.

> Currently I'm blaming myself, and I haven't looked at it lately, but I 
> feel it should not be so hard for a listener to create a shared socket, 
> start up a worker thread (process) which opens the socket and takes 
> over from that point while the listener closes the socket and forgets 
> about it.
> 
> I've got an idea what is going wrong, and how to fix it, but I got so 
> disgusted that I vowed to wait for the new TCP/IP from VSI.  Things are 
> coming up which will perhaps desire the capability.

Yeah; waiting on what documentation and features will be available from 
VSI for that discussion to start.

> Regardless, there is the issue of secure communications.  I got it 
> working, (with your help) and it was so confusing (to me) that I 
> figured that if I put it into production, some future maintainer would 
> get lost looking at it.  That's very bad for production code.  So I'm 
> letting you lead the charge for better (is good too much to hope for?) 
> certificate capabilities on VMS.

One of the pieces I'm looking at here is the Apple Network Framework 
API implementation.  They've done a lot of work here, too.

But then the whole of the OpenVMS APIs is in need of help, as it's 
really getting tiring—and expensive, and slow, and tedious—to implement 
all of this source code completely custom.  Or the source code ends up 
doing less, and/or brittle, and/or arcane, and/or complex.  Or filled 
with source code clutter, irrespective of the OpenVMS programming 
language chosen.


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