[Info-vax] inertia or fundamentals about langages?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-05-27 03:20:04 +0000, Tim Sneddon said:

> Hans Vlems <jhlmvlems at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I found the Mach port to be the most clever.
>> 
>> Could you elaborate on the last sentence please?
> 
> This is likely what Hoff is referring to:
> 
> https://mirrors.pdp-11.ru/_vms/doc/usenix_vms-on-mach.pdf
> 
> It is a really good read.  Quite an interesting integration of VMS into 
> a micro-kernel based environment.  Had this actually gone somewhere it 
> would definitely have been interesting to see it swapped out for 
> something like L4 in the long-term.

That prototype was what was being referenced, yes.  That prototype was 
a quite interesting project, and was quite surprisingly far along and 
with very few folks working on it.

Repeating some of the Mach and L4 links I've posted previously:
https://www.systems.ethz.ch/sites/default/files/file/aos2012/slides/06-MicrokernelsAndIPC.pdf 

https://ts.data61.csiro.au/publications/nicta_full_text/8988.pdf
http://l4hq.org/docs/manuals/l4uman.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20171110115139/http://www.sture.ch/vms/Usenix_VMS-on-Mach.pdf 


The computing trend even back then was toward multiprocessing, and 
that's a comparatively good environment for Mach and ilk.

I became aware of the DEC MICA work much later, but that too has some 
good ideas.  Some of those ideas certainly now seem viable and visible 
within Windows 10.
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/prism/

The production ports of OpenVMS for Alpha and Itanium were interesting 
and technically complex and challenging in various ways, but haven't 
particularly diverged from the design and organization of the 
progenitor VAX modular kernel.




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