[Info-vax] PL/I (Re: VMS Software needs to port VAX DIBOL to OpenVMS X86 platform)

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/5/2021 2:05 AM, Tim Sneddon wrote:
> Craig A. Berry <craigberry at nospam.mac.com> wrote:
>> The folks making money from PL/I on OpenVMS Alpha did not see a business
>> case for porting it to Itanium almost 20 years ago,
> 
> There absolutely was a case.  Unfortunately, there was also an expectation
> that somethings should come for free.  That something being the GEM backend.
> PL/I uses the BL 21 release of GEM (with some other tweaks from later
> versions).  However, there were some big changes in GEM that broke things
> so much so that Ada didn't move forward either.  By the time Itanium
> happened GEM development had moved on and little thought was given to all
> the annoying things that PL/I needed.  So, a PL/I on Itanium either needed
> a retargetted compiler or development to bring the VMS code-base to a
> later GEM an then a move to GEM on Itanium.
> 
> I proposed retargetting the UNIX compiler to LLVM and moving forward.  This
> was knocked back because the opinion was that HP should provide the GEM
> backend, etc. for free.  There was nothing technical about the decision
> at all.

Targetting JVM (or CLR for non-VMS) may have been a wise move.

That would have solved the platform problem.

Obviously there is also some potential problems. How common was
it for VMS PL/I program to call LIB$/SYS$ or link with Macro-32/C code?

Arne