[Info-vax] VSI strategy for OpenVMS

[Craig A. Berry]

On 9/12/21 1:53 PM, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <shldvp$1jl$1 at gioia.aioe.org>, =?UTF-8?Q?Arne_Vajh=c3=b8j?=
> <arne at vajhoej.dk> writes:

>> - work with open source projects to include VMS as supported platform
>>     in main repo
> 
> Definitely.  LaTeX!  Firefox!!!

FireFox now requires a Rust compiler in addition to C or C++.  That
isn't completely out of the realm of possibilities with LLVM soon to be
available, but it also doesn't come for free.  It would be a sizable
project and unlikely to be a realistic goal for a small compiler team
that has spent the last five or six years just trying to get the
existing VMS compilers into a state where they can target x86_64.

A chromium-based browser is also theoretically possible, but would
involve porting the V8 Javascript engine as well as several other very
large projects.  Again, getting to OpenVMS x64 will remove or mitigate
some of the most obvious technical obstacles, but won't make anything
happen automatically or for free, and there is not much of a business
case to make it happen.