[Info-vax] Guess the VMS Basic for x86-64 release date

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 9/8/2023 8:21 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2023-09-08, John Reagan <xyzzy1959 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thursday, September 7, 2023 at 10:01:31?PM UTC-4, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> On 9/7/2023 9:56 PM, John Reagan wrote:
>>>> We're actually trying to refresh other compilers this month as well. Too
>>>> many things to keep track off including a fresh set of COBOL issues
>>>> and working on the debugger & DWARF generation.
>>> Am I right in assuming that you have gotten more compiler error reports
>>> since you released the x86-64 native compilers for field test to
>>> hobbyists than the previous 20 years?

>> Just 20 years?  Sure.  There hasn't been many major revisions since 2003.
>> However, I certainly remember large numbers of bugs from our first years
>> with GEM compilers (both with frontends not generating the correct GEM
>> IR and with GEM doing incorrect optmizations).  I can remember the early
>> days and Pascal having over 75 open bugs against it.  Today I think I have
>> 5 or 6 (not counting the ones I know about that nobody has reported yet)
> 
> Well, that certainly speaks to hobbyists being an actual asset to VSI,
> and not just some overhead to be tolerated.

Yes. Having hobbyists find compiler bugs building open source seems
beneficial to having paying customers finding the same bugs building
their business critical applications seems like a very good thing
for VSI.

> Hobbyists are also likely to do things that production users may not, and
> hence discover more things, so that's another asset source to VSI right
> there.

Probably not in the compiler space.

But definitely in the HW/VM support space.

Arne