[Info-vax] A portable VMS, was: Re: OS Ancestry

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2021-05-17 19:12:23 +0000, Simon Clubley said:

> ...Operating system concepts mostly have nothing to do with portability...

Gonna have to decide if you're building new with ease of porting 
OpenVMS apps to the new, or building new with close OpenVMS 
compatibility with the old.

The former presumably with a path toward more updates and new work and 
evolving, while the latter maintaining the existing apps and with less 
work for the developers porting the apps.

DEC MICA tried to split this, allowing what amounted to containers for 
the operating systems. The modern version being paravirtualized 
hypervisors, and Sector7-style porting environments.

The trade-offs continue from there too, including the two- or 
four-modes discussions, whether drivers will be included, how much of 
POSIX or of .NET, and many thousands of other choices.

And I don't see a viable market for stasis; for OpenVMS not moving 
forward, and quickly. Nor a viable market for an alternative to OpenVMS 
that isn't moving forward.

I don't see itemlists or descriptors or FAB/RAB/NAML/XAB or the rest of 
the existing OpenVMS API design being particularly interesting to 
developers, either—not outside of existing code.

Support for OO and FRP would be expected, either in the existing 
OpenVMS environment, or as an upgrade path for OpenVMS apps.

Looking at current and future hardware too, we're getting more cores, 
more memory and with NUMA and clustering, and with faster storage. But 
we're not getting robust support for more modes. Not past two modes 
plus hypervisor and enclave support.

But the scale of operating system development work here is 
change-back-from-your-billion and that over a decade of work and a 
decade of trade-offs, and I'd have to check the couch cushions for that 
kind of cash and schedule time.


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