[Info-vax] OpenVMS development tooling

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 9/28/2021 6:48 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
> On Wednesday, September 29, 2021 at 1:55:39 AM UTC+13, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 9/27/2021 10:24 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
>>> But then again, with Open Source, the exact architecture doesn’t
>>> matter as much. It’s easier to port such code across different
>>> instruction sets, while the proprietary vendors have a hard time.
>>
>> The license means absolutely nothing for the porting effort.
> 
> Real-world experience shows otherwise.

Simple logic tell it to be the case.

Porting foo.c or bar.pas from one platform to another platform
does not depend on the license at the top as that are comments that does 
not need to be compiled.

> Consider that Linux and the GNU toolset are available across
> something like two dozen different major processor architectures -- basically
> about one new architecture for every year Linux has been in existence.

But that is because they are written in C and for the most can just
be compiled on any platform with a C compiler (and maybe a *nix API).

If they had been written in assembler, then it had been a lot more
work and would likely not had happened.

No matter the license.

> For comparison, Windows NT, arguably the most successful of the
> proprietary OSes, was supposed to be portable across multiple
> architectures, yet every one of its non-x86 ports has failed.

No - all ports succeeded.

Except for the x86 to x86-64 port they were not commercially successful,
but that has nothing to do with effort to port.

> And as for VMS? Still struggling further behind. >

VMS is on its third platform migration. It is doable although
not super easy. But the challenges has more to do with
language being Macro-32 instead of C than the license text
at the top.

Arne