[Info-vax] Which programming language would you like to see officially supported on VMS ?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2020-08-13 15:02:24 +0000, Dave Froble said:

> On 8/13/2020 8:55 AM, gérard Calliet wrote:
>> Le 20/02/2020 à 03:45, John Reagan a écrit :
>>> I'll need Cmake on OpenVMS to build LLVM on x86.
>> Will we get Cmake and up-to-date LLVM also on itanium ?
> 
> Gerald,
> 
>  From some of your posts it appears you're interested in seeing VSI 
> continue to develop for VAX, Alpha, and itanic.  If so, then you're 
> going to be disappointed.  All three of those are basically dead 
> products.

There are a few more years of Kittson-class Integrity hardware support 
left from HPE when last I checked (2025?), but little other OpenVMS 
hardware around still has vendor hardware support. It's increasingly 
third-party.

> x86 is the beginning of the future.

Correct. x86-64 is the near-term future, at least until the next port 
(to arm64? or maybe RISC V?) rolls around.

> Without being John, I can still pretty much guarantee you that you will 
> not see LLVM on VAX, Alpha, or itanic from VSI.

Ayup. That'd be a whole lot of work for dead-end hardware, too.

> While there are multiple reasons, the main reason is that VSI is 
> leverging x86 work on LLVM for VMS usage.  As far as I know, there is 
> no LLVM already on itanic.  Thus, VSI would have to develop the entire 
> compiler tool chain, and, that just isn't going to happen.

With a stable x86-64 port, there's a place for folks currently running 
OpenVMS on Alpha and Itanium to upgrade to.

That'll be an app port with an x86-64 hardware upgrade that will take 
many sites five or ten years to complete, too. Assuming prerequisites 
are available, etc.

And that porting is also after sorting out which x86-64 hardware 
configurations are supported, if not booting OpenVMS hosted and/or as a 
guest in a supported hypervisor.

I'd expect very few OpenVMS sites are unlikely to switch to new 
compilers on the same existing platforms. And that work probably only 
in preparation for an x86-64 port.




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