[Info-vax] VMS Software needs to port VAX DIBOL to OpenVMS X86 platform

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2020-12-26 13:58:14 +0000, Simon Clubley said:

> On 2020-12-26, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) 
> <helbig at asclothestro.multivax.de> wrote:
>> In article <rs761t$43l$4 at dont-email.me>, Simon Clubley 
>> <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:
>> 
>>> Is anyone still using PL/I BTW ?
>> 
>> Wasn't MONITOR written in PL/I?
> 
> If it was, then it probably got rewritten.

It was (written in PL/I), and it did (get rewritten, into C).

The RMI calls were added as part of that MONITOR work, as the SPI calls 
were problematic.

> All of the Ada stuff in VMS got rewritten in another language, for example.

ACME was written in Ada through Itanium. The author of that particular 
code was very fond of Ada. What VSI is doing with that code for x86-64 
port?

> There was a rumour making the rounds many years ago that every DEC 
> language was used in at least one component in VMS so they could 
> justify shipping all the language-specific runtimes with VMS.
> 
> If true, those days are now long gone.

Cue discussions of DLL hell (as currently implemented), and of shipping 
dependencies with apps (a different form of dependency hell). This 
related to automated app update notification mechanisms (lacking on 
OpenVMS), as well.

Sharing dependencies saved disk space and memory. Code size has not 
kept up with storage capacity and memory capacity, and the prices for 
storage and memory have dropped substantially since VAX.

ps: RTL incompatibilities are less visible with GSMATCH values now 
intentionally maintained as static and thus effectively disabled for 
the languages, though that policy change has not been called out in the 
docs AFAIK.


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