[Info-vax] OpenVMS development tooling

[David Goodwin]

On Thursday, September 30, 2021 at 11:15:19 AM UTC+13, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
> On Thursday, September 30, 2021 at 1:48:24 AM UTC+13, Arne Vajhøj wrote: 
> > On 9/29/2021 3:09 AM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote: 
> > 
> >> Yet Windows NT on that was a complete nonstarter. 
> > 
> > MS never attempted to port to SPARC. 
> > 
> > Intergraph announced that they would but never delivered anything.
> Presumably that port was attempted with Microsoft’s cooperation. So all I can say is “I rest my case!” 

Intergraph did successfully port Windows NT to clipper and demonstrated it at some trade 
show in 1993 before deciding their own CPU architecture had no future and abandoned
the windows port, the Clipper architecture itself and everything they put those CPUs into. 
This is when they announced the SPARC port commenting that their experience of porting 
NT to Clipper had been positive.

Obviously the SPARC port never got released but that is likely down to issues within
Intergraph - they gave up on SPARC too and started selling x86 hardware before
abandoning hardware all together a few years later.

> You know what else is in the current Linux source tree <https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/arch>, besides SPARC? HP PA-RISC! And Motorola 68K!

PA-RISC and Motorola 68k are also dead platforms. How well are those going to run modern
workloads?

I'd argue there is little value in having a modern Linux kernel on such systems too.
The latest kernel doesn't magically make the CPU fast enough to run chrome or give the
frame buffer 3D acceleration. Realistically my Sun Blade 1500 is going to run software
of early 2000s level complexity using early 2000s era parts whether its an early 2000s 
Linux kernel or the very latest one. With that in mind why put Linux on it at all? A
Raspberry Pi will probably do the job faster with less heat and power consumption. The 
Sun is better off running Solaris - then at least I've got something interesting and 
different to play with.