[Info-vax] Future comparison of optimized VSI x86 compilers vs Linux compilers

[dthittner at gmail.com]

On Monday, August 3, 2020 at 8:03:44 PM UTC-4, John Reagan wrote:

>If I didn't go with clang/LLVM but enhanced GEM, I'd have to not only track all the hardware variants, I'd have to track all the C++ language and STL changes.  No thanks.  I'd need 50 people.  With a clang-based environment, I can hope that open source code can come to OpenVMS with little pain (lets not get into the mixed-pointer discussion here please). 

> And flang actually has lots of VAX Fortran features in it given that VAX Fortran was the industry standard for a long time.  No, it doesn't have CDD or /DIAG or /ANAL support, but it has lots of the language syntax already.  I've in regular communication with the flang manager.

I was wondering if VSI was going to look at flang to replace the FORTRAN compiler on x86. It seemed to me that getting the open-source community to help keep your compilers up-to-date would be a win-win for keeping language standards compliance high while keeping your cost of development down. Glad to see you are considering getting community support to help keep OpenVMS up-to-date.

David