[Info-vax] VMS on Raspberry Pi 5

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 11/14/2023 4:27 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> On 2023-11-13 18:57, Jake Hamby (Solid State Jake) wrote:
>> On Monday, November 13, 2023 at 9:44:19 AM UTC-8, Pancho wrote:
>>> On 13/11/2023 15:12, Bob Eager wrote:
>>>>
>>>> That's a more realistic figure, and what has been observed (by me).
>>> Observed figures are always more realistic, they are, after all, real.
>>>
>>> Apparently, my rPi5 has arrived today, but I'm not going to test the
>>> emulator. I'm happy to leave the VMS part of my life, in the past.
>>>
>>> Looking back on it now. I think the strangest thing about VMS was the
>>> Manual Set.
>>
>> Why is it strange that so much printed documentation was released with 
>> VMS? To me, the real strangeness is in learning all the proprietary 
>> APIs documented in all of those printed manuals. :) Thank goodness HP 
>> made all the documentation available in PDF form and often HTML as 
>> well for free in the early 2000's. The current VSI docs site is even 
>> better, with better HTML rendering of the original documents.
> 
> Do you think all the propietary APIs and libraries under Unix are any 
> different?
> Nowadays there is POSIX (didn't even exist back when VMS was designed), 
> but POSIX only covers a small fraction of the libraries people use in 
> development.
> 
> Online documentation like man-pages is helpful, but it's usually not 
> nearly as deep as the VMS paper docs. The fact that the VMS docs were 
> made available as HTML and PDF was a nice improvement.

The VMS API (SYS$, LIB$ etc.) is tiny by todays standard.

Windows is huge. Win32, MFC, OLE/COM/ATL, .NET FX, WinRT etc.
are probably a factor 100 bigger than VMS.

Linux is a bit more tricky to measure, because it is not very well
defined what to count: Linux kernel, glibc/musl, curses,
Xlib + Xt + GTK/Qt, hundreds of development libraries available
via distro package manager. I will claim that a "typical"
Linux development machine has a lot more API's installed
than VMS has.

The non-OS platform API's are also way bigger than VMS API
(Java + Maven repo, .NET Core + NuGet, Python + PyPi,
JS + npm etc.).

Arne