Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Chris Townley <news@cct-net.co.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: Bootcamp
Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2025 17:47:04 +0100
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On 03/07/2025 17:33, bill wrote:
> On 7/3/2025 10:56 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 7/2/2025 7:32 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>> On Wed, 2 Jul 2025 14:01:46 +0200, gcalliet wrote:
>>>> Le 02/07/2025 à 02:05, Lawrence D'Oliveiro a écrit :
>>>>> I would say their market is a fraction of what it would have been if
>>>>> they had been ready with an x86 port say, five years earlier.
>>>>>
>>>> Of course.
>>>>
>>>> But also VSI didn't really address the ecosystem as the complex set it
>>>> is, with totally different needs and paces of evolution.
>>>
>>> Essentially all the (remaining) customers were waiting to move to x86,
>>> because all the existing platforms that VMS ran on were dead-ends 10 
>>> years
>>> ago. The only strategy left to VSI was “run as fast as possible”.
>>>
>>> We discussed this sort of thing in this group a few years ago. The 
>>> obvious
>>> way it seemed to me to get to a shipping product as quickly as possible
>>> was to re-implement VMS as an emulation layer on top of a Linux kernel.
>>> Chuck away all the internals of the super/exec/kernel-mode legacy 
>>> baggage:
>>> keep just the userland APIs and DCL. Hardly anybody would care about
>>> anything else.
>>
>> You keep pushing that idea.
>>
>> But:
>> 1) Third party user mode emulations has existed for decades, but
>>     there is still demand for VMS, so the hypothesis that
>>     "Hardly anybody would care about anything else" does not
>>     match with the real world.
>> 2) The assumption that it would be easier to rewrite user mode
>>     stuff to use Linux kernel than rewrite VMS kernel to support
>>     x86-64 has been rejected by everyone that has spoken on the
>>     topic *and* has actually worked on VMS.
>> 3) The kernel is only a part of the project - an important part
>>     but still just a part. Another huge part has been the compilers.
>>     Getting Fortran, Pascal, Cobol and Basic compilers that
>>     accept all the traditional VMS extensions so existing code
>>     continues to compile has been a huge effort.
>> 4) As with any software project writing the code is just a
>>     part of the project. On top of that comes planning,
>>     project management, testing, documentation etc.. The number
>>     of hours for does not depend much on the technical implementation.
>> 5) The idea of emulating one OS on another OS is questionable
>>     in itself. It is not that difficult to achieve 90-95%
>>     compatibility. But 100% compatibility is very hard. Because
>>     the core OS design tend to spill over into
>>     userland semantics. It is always tricky to emulate *nix
>>     on VMS and it would be be tricky to emulate VMS on *nix.
>>     Getting DCL, image activation, process permanent files,
>>     subprocesses, logicals and symbols working 100% compatible
>>     on a Linux kernel would not be easy. A lot hang on the
>>     4 mode design and DCL being in S.
>>
> 
> Please stop feeding the troll.  He is going to continue to insist
> that the only survival for VMS is to become another Linux distribution.
> You can't win.  Starve it and let it die.
> 
> bill
> 

+1

-- 
Chris