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From: cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: ISO: The Eiffel OO programming language and IDE, on VMS
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2025 12:14:51 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC
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In article <vs0qdf$1mlt9$1@dont-email.me>,
Arne Vajhøj  <arne@vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>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.

The official Rust compiler is an interesting case in point, as
it's already built on LLVM.  Getting it running on VMS probably
wouldn't be that hard; getting it to output code targetting VMS
is probably harder, but certainly doable.

	- Dan C.