Re: Bootcamp

On 2025-07-06 00:36:51 +0000, Waldek Hebisch said:

You mention Wine, but do you know what you are talking about?  At the start Wine project had idea similar to yours: write loader for Windows binaries, redirect system library calls to equivalent Linux system/library calls and call it done.  The loader part
went smoothly, but they relatively quickly (in around 2 years) discoverd that devil is in emulating Windows libraries.  Initial idea of redirecting...

Some folks are seemingly unfamiliar with OpenVMS and OpenVMS apps, and apparently also seemingly unfamiliar with Linux, and with a fondness for unworkable suggestions.  Not that I too don't have a fondness for unworkable suggestions.
What you've posted has been highlighted before. As has porting VAX/VMS to the Mach kernel, which actually happened. (Hi, Chris!) It also doesn't appreciably move the operating system work forward. Ports ~never do.
And there is a vendor that already provides custom solutions based on porting parts of the APIs to another platform, with Sector7. What Sector7 offers very much parallels Proton and Wine, too. But unlike VSI and Sector7, there are a whole lot more users of each of those candidate apps than the often-one-off apps found on OpenVMS.  That disparity increases the effort involved for each app, and for the users of that app.
And at the end of all that work, what's left? Outsourcing third-party OpenVMS app support to VSI, on a compatibility API? They can offer that now, and without creating Proton  and Wine.

Given 40+ developement team (this seem to correspond to publicaly available information about VSI) and considering 10kloc/year developer productivity...
...What went wrong?  Clearly VSI hit some difficulties...

40 or 50 engineers is far too small for a project of the scale and scope of a feature-competitive operating system.  For a competitive platform, I'd be looking to build (slowly) to 2000, andquite possibly more. But that takes revenues and reinvestments.
As an example of scale and scope that ties back to Valve and their efforts with Wine and Proton and Steam Deck and other functions, Valve may well presently have as many job openings as VSI has engineers:
https://www.glassdoor.com/Jobs/Valve-Corporation-Jobs-E24849.htm
https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/
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