[Info-vax] LLVM, volatile and async VMS I/O and system calls

[chris]

On 10/03/21 01:32, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2021-10-02 23:38:12 +0000, chris said:
>
>> No, really trolling, just saw your original post as arm waving in
>> respect of some mysterious process, as yet undiscovered, that could
>> cause havoc to vms builds. As I said upthread, vms has been rewritten
>> twice already, so sure such issues would have been noticed and dealt
>> with.
>
> OpenVMS has been ported, yes. OpenVMS has not been rewritten twice. Each
> port further isolates the platform-independent from the
> platform-specific too, while the vast majority of the existing source
> code is unchanged.
>
> Previous ports have shown weird bugs, those latent in the existing
> codebase that was ported, those bugs introduced by the platform tools,
> and those exposed by (for instance) updated processors of the same
> architecture. q.v. SRM_CHECK.
>
> Some enhancements and optimizations have exposed latent bugs in the
> platform and in apps, too. The async I/O completion work from (as it was
> then known) VAX/VMS 5.0 field test exposed myriad latent errors, and was
> backed out for the V5.0 release.

Perhaps rewritten was the wrong word, so ported ?. Even so, would
suspect a lot of the low leve stuff (which this thread is about) must
have been rewritten as part of the porting effort.

>
> Hyrum's Law: With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not
> matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of
> your system will be depended on by somebody."
>
> And some of us would be interested in some Arm waving too, but for now
> it's all x86-64 waving.
>

Very much so, but needs an available standard platform in volume to make
it worthwhile for sw vendors to get behind it...

Really hard to break the X86 stranglehold...

Chris


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