[Info-vax] VMS Software Q1 '23 Update

[John Dallman]

In article <tqp7bm$871q$1 at dont-email.me>,
clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP (Simon Clubley) wrote:

> There are no longer any current plans for bare metal support:

That is not surprising. I'm having to provide comprehensive
justifications for running /any/ server OS on bare metal. This applies
even where it's much more efficient (because of natural code segment
sharing when running many copies of a large application for testing). 

The current fashion among corporate sysadmins is "VMWare for everything."
It gives them more of a feeling of power, because they expect they can
bluff their way out of hard work requested by users or manager who don't
understand virtualisation. 

> Efforts to expand the VMS userbase have been abandoned:

Given VSI's fairly limited resources, getting the existing customers
thoroughly supported seems the best idea for the next couple of years.
Trying to take back long-departed customers when they don't have a
comprehensively modern offering is likely futile. 

Applications that have migrated off VMS have been updated a lot since
then. For example, the code I work on was originally developed on VAX/VMS,
using VMS C in pre-ANSI C days. Nowadays it will need C++20 by mid-summer,
and Clang 10 doesn't provide that. 

John