[Info-vax] [OT] Early 64-bit test build of Windows 2000 for Alpha found

[Simon Clubley]

On 2023-05-19, John Dallman <jgd at cix.co.uk> wrote:
> In article <u48n61$pdn1$1 at dont-email.me>,
> clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP (Simon Clubley) wrote:
>
>> In fact about the only major idea he didn't bring across was the 
>> use of Pillar (or something comparable) instead of C as the SIL.
>> 
>> We lost a major opportunity to establish a viable alternative to C 
>> because of that and the security of our computing infrastructure 
>> is poorer because of it.
>
> I think it was already too late by 1988. Such an OS would have had to
> have supported C and C++ for software portability. Microsoft would have
> had to implement any new language, but must have wanted to get on with
> Windows NT. Also, their developers already knew C/C++ and they really
> weren't very security-conscious in those days.
>

DEC had already thrashed out many of those issues by then for PRISM, if
not fully implemented them before it was cancelled (according to the
public material on PRISM).

In particular, they considered both Pillar and C to be system programming
languages for PRISM. You may find the following memo from the time
interesting:

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/prism/mica/870827_DECwest_Compiler_Project.pdf

Section 3 is the interesting section, where DEC talks about it using Pillar
due to the added software robustness, while customers would be likely to
use C because that is what the customers were familiar with.

BTW, I notice from that memo how Pascal was going to be in the _first_
wave of available user-level compilers for PRISM. :-)

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.