[Info-vax] New VSI post on Youtube

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 8/14/2024 1:48 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2024-08-14, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>> On 8/12/2024 10:53 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> Oracle and VMS Software on Application Development and Migration to x86:
>>>
>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmLEI5O1JSw
>>>
>>> I have not seen & heard it all yet.
>>>
>>> Somewhere in the middle they summarize the status of the x86-64 port
>>> as: 8920 tests succeed + 271 tests fail + 608 test not run yet.
>>
>> Did this get lost in all the spam filters?
>>
>> I guess a YouTube link does look like spam, but ...
>>
> 
> I did see this the first time around, but had nothing to say at the time.
> 
> However, since you ask, I prefer a writeup rather than a 40 minute video
> for this kind of update, but based on the numbers above, they are making
> good progress but are not there yet.

I 100% agree.

There is a link to the slide decks on Youtube.

> Based on the above, I would guess/hope early next year for them to be ready,
> which would put them a year behind schedule. It would be interesting to
> know the reasons for the failures however and what is different about the
> x86-64 environment that resulted in test differences that ended up being
> classified as failures.
> 
> In total, there's about 10% of the tests which have not been done or have
> failed, but as we all know the first 90% of a project takes 90% of the
> time and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time. :-)

Slide 39 says H1CY2025 so "early next year".

The slides list some of the challenges they had.

In my poor wording:
* like everybody else they had to start with cross compilers
   and then switch to native compilers
* they need to generate native code, so they needed to get
   GEM2LLVM and LLVM backends from VSI and integrate them
* like everybody else they got problems with C++ code because
   clang is not compatible with traditional VMS C++
* they relied on some tools build with VAX SCAN and first
   VESTed and later AESTed - since no IEST exist they had to
   rewrite those tools (in Java)

The slides does not say so, but it is probably a huge code base
and given that some of it is 4 decades old, then there may be some
hacks in the code.

Oracle DB - what is known as Oracle Classic in the VMS world:
     https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

:-)

Arne