[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/5/2024 9:08 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 1/4/2024 11:44 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>> On Fri, 5 Jan 2024 03:09:37 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:
>>> I think, again, you are talking at cross-purposes: my suspicion is that
>>> Arne is referring to a VMS compatibility layer built on top of Linux,
>>> not the effort of porting VMS to x86_64.
>>
>> I thought I made it pretty clear early on that I was only talking about
>> porting across userland executables and DCL command procedures--just the
>> parts of VMS that users care about, nothing more.
> 
> If the goal is 90% compatibility, then it is reasonable easy and
> low cost. But no customer demand.
> 
> If the goal is 100% compatibility, then it becomes tricky and expensive.
> 
> There will be both some hard problems and a gazillion trivial problems
> to deal with.
> 
> Let me be specific. It is not difficult creating functions named
> LIB$GETJPI and SYS$GETJPIW accepting certain argument. But what are
> they going to return when asked for an item that does not exist
> on Linux?

Another example:

SYS$SETPRV with PRV$M_SYSNAM  followed by SYS$CRELNM with LNM$_TABLE
as "LNM$SYSTEM_TABLE".

The API is not that complex. The semantics on VMS is well
documented.

But the code does not really make any sense on Linux. So
what to do?

Arne