[Info-vax] Open source usage, Was Python and various libraries updated

[John Dallman]

In article <hpkpniFccnpU1 at mid.individual.net>,
gerard.calliet at pia-sofer.fr (gérard Calliet) wrote:

> Another mistake is to spoil the HW and emulator based supports of 
> VMS now. For sure x86 will be a lot better, and without it no 
> future, but now (between 2014 and 2022) we can do a lot of things 
> with what we have.

You cannot interest open-source people who don't currently use VMS in
having their projects support VMS without the x86 port. That is a
relatively easy route to getting software onto VMS, and far more likely
to be successful than persuading companies that don't currently use VMS
to take up RDB. 

Marvellous though VMS is, I don't believe it allows time travel. We
cannot do anything with the time between 2014 and 2020 and there is no
point in complaining about the ways in which it was used. 

> n.b.: The itanic joke is just the meeting of the conservatism of 
> the old, the narrow-minded reasoning of the big investors for the 
> compilers, and the anti-trust and therefore anti-intel ideology of 
> the younger generations. Result: the microprocessor is back to the 
> stone age (x86 is VAX but not as good, and with a turbo).

Itanium looked convincing at first, but it was never possible to extract
the theoretical performance. I'm not just posturing: I've ported large
pieces of mathematical modelling software to Itanium, for Windows and
HP-UX. The experience changed me from being a believer in Itanium to a
profound cynic. It was several years of work, which came nowhere near
paying for its costs. 

x86-64 is not pretty and does not have elegant theories behind it, but it
is fairly practical, and compilers can extract most of the performance it
is capable of. Porting the same mathematical modelling software to it
took less than 5% of the effort of Itanium, and it has been the mainstay
of my employer's business for over a decade. 

HP didn't give up on Itanium for emotional or fashion reasons. They
abandoned it because the income from it was steadily and rapidly
declining. My employers gave up on it over a decade ago, and there's
never been any reason to reconsider that decision. 

John