[Info-vax] VSI strategy for OpenVMS

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 9/13/2021 8:29 AM, chris wrote:
> On 09/13/21 13:09, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> On 9/13/21 5:53 AM, Joukj wrote:
>>> John Dallman wrote:
>>>> In article <shldvp$1jl$1 at gioia.aioe.org>, arne at vajhoej.dk (Arne Vajhøj)
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I doubt, for example, that Libre Office or Firefox will be especially
>>>> worthwhile. Current GUI apps are likely to need more than the X11/Motif
>>>> stack, and providing Qt looks like a big job. Databases, middleware and
>>>> the like might well be more worthwhile.
>>>>
>>> Qt would be nice, but I see more applications which are based on gtk.
>>> I know there exists a port of gtk1, but newer versions are not 
>>> available.
>>> John Malmerg and myself both tried independently to get a newer
>>> versing working, but only came to a versions that compiles, but
>>> crashes in most cases at run-time.
>>> A lot of Debugging is needed. But a good version of gtk+ would realy
>>> help to port a lot of nice other tools.
>>
>> That and fork(). :-)
> 
> VMS will need some sort of unix abstraction layer to make use of all
> the Linux and other os open source packages. Done right, it should
> make the porting task much easier.

Compilers with support for latest language standards, runtime libraries
that provide what is expected today of any OS, VMS support in common
libraries will certainly help.

But I doubt there is value in true Linux emulation (non-Linux Unix
is not relevant). It probably would have been relevant 15 years ago.
But I am not so sure about today.

The industry trend is moving towards huge libraries that encapsulate
the OS and avoid OS specific calls in application code.

Sure it is easier if those libraries can use the Linux code
on VMS, but applications should outnumber libraries by a few magnitudes.

If someone really needs Linux then they will probably run Linux.

I believe Microsofts take on WSL is telling - they started by
trying to emulate Linux and then in version 2 they just started a VM
and ran Linux.

> As for Firefox. I tried to build a current version from source to run
> under FreeBSD Sparc a couple of years ago, but put it to one side
> after a shed load of dependent packages had been built. May revisit,
> but it's no easy task at all...

Yep.

High cost. Almost no revenue. No chance VSI will work on that.

Arne