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

[Wilm Boerhout]

John Reagan schreef op 21-12-2020 om 02:55:
> 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.
> 

Apropos DECnet IV: a bunch of us in the HECnet alternate universe have 
been running pydecnet (that is, DECnet IV written in python from the 
original DECnet specifications) for a while now, thanks to Paul Koning's 
implementation effort ***bows to Paul***

Just sayin'

/Wilm