[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Sunday, October 17, 2021 at 3:26:11 AM UTC+13, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 10/15/2021 10:45 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote: 
>
>> If VMS compatibility for user-mode code just takes the form of a 
>> library to link against ...
>
> The most important word in that sentence is "If". 
> 
> Because that assumption is not valid at all. 

Sure it can be done. Once you strip out everything that isn’t user-mode code, what’s left of VMS (as it appears to the app) could be implemented in a compatibility library. Call it “libstarlet”. It would implement the calls for QIO and RMS, and whatever else we need. It would not be entirely self-contained: many services (e.g. logical-name translations, DECnet) would require connections to other service processes.

> VMS C and C++ has some VMS specific language extensions. 
> 
> VMS Fortran and Cobol has a lot of VMS specific language extensions. 

I thought COBOL was supposed to be a standard language that needed almost no special extensions at all?

> VMS Pascal and Basic are very different from those languages on 
> other platforms. 
> 
> And both GCC and LLVM only have good support for C, C++ and Fortran 
> anyway. 

Actually, both have been used as the basis for quite a number of languages.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM> mentions a whole lot of language implementations built on top of LLVM. For a similar list for GCC, try

    apt-cache rdepends gcc

> And then there is Macro-32 and Bliss-32 ... 

If they could make the move to Alpha, they can be moved anywhere...