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

[Scott Dorsey]

David Goodwin  <dgsoftnz at gmail.com> wrote:
>On Friday, August 14, 2020 at 3:08:43 AM UTC+12, John Reagan wrote:
>> There USED to be an Itanium target for LLVM but it is long dead and remov=
>ed from the current tree.  I've never seen reference to a VAX or Alpha targ=
>et.  It is pretty "easy" to write an LLVM target.  Somebody is trying a 680=
>40 target and I've also seen a joke target for Z-80 (as a cross-compiler on=
>ly of course).
>
>There was an Alpha target too but it was removed in 2011:
>https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/commit/4c9fca99c9a6734bb33c34aeaf40b71=
>c4002757e
>
>Looks like it was removed because no one was actively maintaining it:
>http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2011-October/044594.html
>
>No idea how hard it would be to resurrect the Alpha target but I guess ther=
>e is a fair bit of code there to look at if anyone is feeling enthusiastic.

The Alpha target worked well and generated pretty tight code.  It would be
worth resurrecting.

The Itanium target never really worked very well in the first place and it
would require a lot of engineering effort to build a good backend that can
take advantage of simultaneous operations effectively.  If that effort was
going to have been made, it would have been made by now.

The C compiler on Alpha wrote code that is as good as mine.  It was hard for
me to code anything by hand tighter than what the compiler made.

The C compiler in Itanium wrote code that was very far from the quality that
an expert Itanium assembler programmer could write.  Unfortunately there were
very few expert Itanium assembler programmers and writing tight code on that
machine means thinking like the machine and is not just an easy transition
from a standard architecture system.
--scott


-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."