[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[Dan Cross]

In article <uncsed$q65q$1 at dont-email.me>,
Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo at nz.invalid> wrote:
>On Sun, 7 Jan 2024 00:27:15 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:
>> It took literally decades from the introduction of 64-bit Unix machines
>> until most software was 64-bit clean.
>
>I was doing Unix sysadmin work on DEC Alphas in the late 1990s until the 
>early 2000s, when the client saw the writing on the wall and moved to 
>Linux (and so did I).

Your anecdotal evidence is not terribly convincing.

I was working on Alphas in the early 90s, shortly after they
were released.  Most of the open source world wasn't ready.

I was also working on 64-bit SGI machines running Irix 6 (on
the MIPS R4000) before the Alpha; similar problem.

>They frequently asked me to download, build and install various items of 
>open-source software. I don't recall ever having a problem with 64-bitness 
>per se.

Sounds like you had very limited experience.

>> I was there; it was a painful
>> time, and Linux was actually behind the curve here compared to many of
>> the commercial vendors.
>
>Jon "maddog: Hall shipped an Alpha to Linus Torvalds somewhere around 
>1995,

Yes.  I already posted that factoid in this newsgroup a couple
of days ago.

>and Linux was running native 64-bit on DEC Alpha in releasable form 
>by about 1996.
>That was only only the second hardware platform that Linux 
>had been implemented on, at that stage. So it went portable at the same 
>time it went 64-bit.

...and you think there weren't bugs.

>> The mere existence of those types a) didn't help the piles of code that
>> was sloppy and made assumptions about primitive types ...
>
>Piles of proprietary code, certainly.

Nope.  You underestimate the amount of code that tried to e.g.
pun an `int` for a pointer in those days.  I ran into this
porting an APL interpreter to x86_64 as late as 2010.

	- Dan C.