[Info-vax] C and assembly language, was: Re: WHY IS VSI REQUIRING A HYPERVISOR FOR X86 OPENVMS?

[John Reagan]

On Sunday, December 20, 2020 at 8:05:52 PM UTC-5, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2020-12-19, Michael C <supers... at gmail.com> wrote: 
> > 
> > A LITTLE LESSON DAVE ANYTHING WRITTEN IN C OR RUNNING ON LINUX OR WINDOZE WILL HAVE A VULNERABILITY LIST A MILE LONG. 
> > 
> > THAT IS WHY YOU DON'T WANT NO MIDDLE MAN WITH OPENVMS
> Much of VMS is written in assembly language which is even worse than 
> C at letting silly errors through. 
> 
> However, the latest work in VMS is done using C so that's an 
> improvement over Macro-32 when it comes to detecting silly errors. 
> 

"Much"?  I think Clair did a line count/module posting in the last year or so.  The Macro-32 contribution was getting pretty low (less than 20%?)  However, just the difficult and nasty parts that nobody wants to attempt to rewrite.  I'd pay real money to watch somebody try to rewrite the shadow driver out of Macro-32 (pretty much every routine can jump into any other routine in an alternative universe threading scheme).  And I've recently had to look at chunks of DECnet IV and even I couldn't make heads-or-tails out of some of the algorithms.