[Info-vax] Prism/Pillar, was: Re: inertia or fundamentals about langages?

[Simon Clubley]

On 2019-05-28, Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:
>
> 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/
>

>From the material I've read, Pillar also looked like a very interesting
system implementation language. It's a pity there was never a freely
available compiler for it.

I wonder if any copyrights on the design documents would stop someone
from using them to implement Pillar using, say, LLVM ? I'm not planning
to do that BTW, but I have wondered about it while reading the Pillar
reference manual.

> 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.
>

Should that be monolithic, instead of modular ?

I wouldn't exactly call the VMS kernel modular, especially by today's
standards.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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