[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Sat, 6 Jan 2024 15:59:58 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> No such concern was made for the Ultrix customers going to DEC OSF/1 aka
> DUNIX aka Tru64.
> 
> DEC made less money from Ultrix. Ultrix and OSF/1 was two different
> Unixes so compatibility would have been difficult anyway. And porting C
> code using a C API was easier anyway.

You almost got the point, didn’t you? That POSIX had defined standard 
types like “time_t” and “size_t”, and code that was written to adhere to 
those types as appropriate was much easier to port between different 
architectures. This applied to customer code, to third-party code ... to 
all code.

And POSIX already existed when Dave Cutler commenced development on 
Windows NT. Back when he was starting VMS, he could claim ignorance of 
such techniques for avoiding obsolescence; what was his excuse this time?

> VMS has only 64 bit code but both 32 bit pointers and 64 bit pointers
> (32 bit pointers getting extended to 64 bit addresses).

Not sure how you can have 64-bit code without 64-bit addressing ... that 
is practically the essence of 64-bit code.

Does that “64-bit” code on VMS still call LIB$EMUL?