[Info-vax] Final Orace release on VMS.

[Craig A. Berry]

On 11/14/20 2:56 PM, John Reagan wrote:
> On Saturday, November 14, 2020 at 2:36:56 PM UTC-5, John Dallman wrote:
>> In article <roosmk$ga0$1... at dont-email.me>, jan-erik.... at telia.com
>> (Jan-Erik Söderholm) wrote:
>>
>>> Read my lips, there will *never* be a "modern" browser running on
>>> VMS servers having features up to date with browsers on desktop
>> systems.
>> Is there some fundamental impossibility to porting Chromium or Firefox?
>> Or do you simply reckon nobody will go to sufficient effort?
>>
>> John
> Firefox has large pieces of Rust.
> 

> I'll guess that both C++ used by both Rust and Chromium wouldn't get
> through the Alpha or Itanium C++ compilers.

FWIW, the Windows build of chromium uses clang rather than Microsoft's
compiler.
> I suppose you can build them on Linux try to move objects over but
> that has all sorts of issues with headers, RTL name prefixing,
> calling convention differences (VMS wants an arg-count).
> 
> And all of that is before you have to deal with whatever libraries
> are used Xorg, GTK+, GDK, and the latest X11.

The Linux build lists about 40 libraries that the build depends on:

<https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/build/install-build-deps.sh#242>

The build also fetches or builds about 100 different libraries that are
not considered part of chromium proper, including little things like the
V8 JavaScript/WebAssembly engine.

There are a bunch of custom build tools, some of which would also need
to be ported. It looks like it would be difficult to do without git, and
vgit would be unlikely to have all the necessary features.