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From: =?UTF-8?Q?Arne_Vajh=C3=B8j?= <arne@vajhoej.dk>
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: ISO: The Eiffel OO programming language and IDE, on VMS
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2025 08:02:56 -0400
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On 3/26/2025 1:09 AM, David Meyer wrote:
> Is there anything in the VSI licensing that would prevent a community of
> VMS and Rust (for example) fans from developing a VMS port of a Rust
> compiler and releasing the compiler as open source?

No.

VMS users can write or port all the compilers they want to. And
they have done so in the past: old versions of GCC C and C++ ran on
VMS VAX and VMS Alpha, old versions of Gnat Ada ran on VMS Alpha
and VMS Itanium.

The reason it is not happening is not license restrictions, but
lack of interest (willing to do work type of interest - not
it would be nice if somebody else did the work interest) in
the VMS community.

The specific discussion was about the LLVM compiler backend,
that VSI use for their compilers. If VSI made that available
(it is open source) then it would be easier for people to
write or port new compilers using LLVM as backend.

Arne