[Info-vax] Lisp alternatives for Emacs [was Re: Python for x86?]

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 4/23/2023 6:06 AM, hb at end.of.inter.net wrote:
> On Sunday, April 23, 2023 at 1:31:32 AM UTC+2, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> My point was that if someone took the 28.2 source and put back all
>> the #ifdef vms code from 21.2 then what would be missing? How much
>> of the new stuff added would require new #ifdef vms code?
>> 
>> I don't think I have played with GNU Emacs since VMS VAX days
>> (early 90's) and I have no idea about what has been added to GNU
>> Emacs the last few decades, but I am sort of guessing that the new
>> stuff would be most "edit stuff" and not so much "system interface
>> stuff". Of course I could be totally wrong.
> 
> The sources on the freeware cd are said to be based on Emacs 21.2.
> The files in the EMACS21_2.ZIP archive are a snapshot of a
> development environment. I could not find these changes in the Emacs
> sources and could not find the Emacs sources on which this
> development environment is based. But that may be my fault not trying
> harder. There may be changes in Emacs which make the known VMS code
> obsolete or require new VMS specific code. It seems a lot of work to
> get VMS support back into the current Emacs sources. How many users
> are there which want/need a current version of Emacs?
> 
> Using that development environment it's possible to build Emacs for
> x86. (The IA64 additions in EMACS21_2_IVMS.ZIP can be ignored; they
> deal with IA64 specifics especially with Short Data.) I did that some
> time ago. There were minor run-time problems. At that time it was not
> obvious what caused them: a build problem with the cross tools
> environment, exception handling, ...? I should try a(nother) native
> build.

So 21.2 will build on all VMS incl. x86-64, but porting VMS changes to
28.2 may be a lot of work because it is not a clean diff from
standard 21.2.

> I used MMK for the builds. A few steps to build Emacs are better done
> on the target platform. MMK for x86 needed a couple of changes. I
> didn't put them back to https://github.com/endlesssoftware/mmk. But I
> just noticed a pull request, which probably describes similar changes
> to build MMK for x86.

We need MMK on VMS x86-64.

:-)

Arne