[Info-vax] VMS device drivers

[Craig A. Berry]

On 1/12/24 6:19 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 1/12/2024 7:13 PM, Chris Townley wrote:
>> On 12/01/2024 16:43, John Reagan wrote:
>> I'm a big fan of eliminating Macro-32 code.
>>> I have a long-standing joke of paying $5 per module for any rewrite out
>>> of Macro-32 into ANY other language.
>>
>> When I joined our programming team in the 90's, I made it clear that I 
>> would not attempt to learn macro. I didn't.
>>
>> I later did the port from Alpha to Itanium, and I found one piece of 
>> macro code that didn't work, so I rewrote in DEC Basic. It was helpful 
>> that the function well documented as to it's parameters, and output, 
>> so it worked 100%
> 
> I believe there are a lot of totally unnecessary Macro-32 code out there.
> 
> If I were to make a guess about it:
> 
> 60% written in Macro-32 in VAX days for performance reasons but without 
> actually improving performance
> 
> 39% written in Macro-32 in VAX days for performance reasons and actually 
> did improve performance on VAX but performance is worse on 
> Alpha/Itanium/x86-64
> 
> 0% written in Macro-32 in VAX days for performance reasons and actually 
> do improve performance on all platforms
> 
> 1% written in Macro-32 to do something not easily expressed in HLL

It was common a decade or three ago to write code in MACRO because it
was the only thing besides DCL that was guaranteed to be there.
Compilers for the other languages were expensive.