[Info-vax] OpenVMS development tooling

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Wednesday, September 29, 2021 at 2:07:36 PM UTC+13, dgso... at gmail.com wrote:
>
> On Wednesday, September 29, 2021 at 1:53:03 PM UTC+13, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote: 
>> 
>> Wonder why, when several of those architectures did go on to be commercially
>> successful, the proprietary OS failed to follow, but the open-source one did?
>
> MIPS: The first port (before even x86): Support was dropped after NT4 SP1 because 
> probably no one was making MIPS workstations anymore besides SGI.

MIPS chips are still being made, probably more units shipping per year than x86. And Linux runs on them. I think China’s Loongson/LoongArch family might be a MIPS derivative (some docs here <https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/README-EN.html>, but still mostly in Chinese, last I looked).

> Alpha: Dropped after Windows 2000 RC1: Compaq killed Alpha. 

But Linux kept running on them for many years. I actually know the guy who was maintaining the Alpha build of Debian, on some unofficially-unretired DEC/Compaq boxes sitting in a departmental server room somewhere ...

> PowerPC: Dropped after NT4 SP2: IBM abandoned the platform. They stopped selling 
> the PowerSeries PCs and Thinkpads, killed the OS/2 Warp 3 port. 

POWER processors still exist, and IBM continues to bring out and sell new generations of them (POWER10 being the latest). And not only that, if you look at the latest list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world <https://top500.org/lists/top500/2021/06/>, you will see POWER machines at places 2 and 3.

> Itanium: The CPU was a dud. Support was dropped after Windows Server 2008 R2 
> because no one cared about Itanium.

I remember Intel saying that the first OS they got to boot on the first Itanium processor was Linux. And even after Microsoft Windows Server for Itanium began dropping in feature completeness behind Windows Server for x86, Linux continued to offer updated support. And that support didn’t actually end until this year. So on Itanium, Linux was first on, and last to abandon ship.

And what about ARM, which if anything is going stronger than ever? Microsoft continues to struggle with trying to get Windows to work properly on that, while Linux systems have been working well on it for years. And RISC-V is making an impact, which Microsoft is totally unprepared for.

All your excuses basically reinforce my point: it is hard for proprietary OSes (and application software) to be cross-platform. Open-source manages it much better.