Re: VSI OpenVMS Webinar 6th June 2024 online

On 6/16/24 3:56 PM, Single Stage to Orbit wrote:

On Sun, 2024-06-16 at 13:44 -0400, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

On 6/16/2024 9:02 AM, Chris Townley wrote:

I just wondered how difficult it would be to port Gnat to VMS. The
Ada community seem to have lots of offerings - why not VMS X86?

>
Given that:
* Gnat is a big piece of software
* It is many versions back since it supported VMS
* Besides Gnat itself there may also be missing supporting software
then it is definitely non-trivial.
>
I suspect that the french that did the VMS Itanium port will
be better to quantify the work. 500 hours? 5000 hours? Or?
>
With the bad tradition in the VMS world the last 25 years
of being very interested in getting free stuff but not being
interested in contributing, then I don't see it happen.

 LLVM has never supported VMS so unless VSI contributes open source
patches back to the LLVM folks for their compiliers, it ain't
happening.

All of the existing OpenVMS x86 native compilers are based on LLVM.  VSI
folks have expressed an intention to send a couple of new features that
they needed back upstream, and also to bring their own port current with
more recent LLVM releases. They may well have to do the latter before
they can do the former. But obviously their priority for the foreseeable
future will be stable and reliable releases of their own compilers that
will enable existing customers to move to x86.

GNU C/C++ might be easier to port, and entirely possible to cross
compile ADA for VMS via amd64.

Easier than what?  Easier than LLVM, which has already been ported?
There have been ports of GCC for VMS, but not targeting x86 that I'm
aware of.