Re: New VSI post on Youtube

On 8/14/2024 1:48 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:

On 2024-08-14, Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> wrote:

On 8/12/2024 10:53 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

Oracle and VMS Software on Application Development and Migration to x86:
>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmLEI5O1JSw
>
I have not seen & heard it all yet.
>
Somewhere in the middle they summarize the status of the x86-64 port
as: 8920 tests succeed + 271 tests fail + 608 test not run yet.

>
Did this get lost in all the spam filters?
>
I guess a YouTube link does look like spam, but ...
>

 I did see this the first time around, but had nothing to say at the time.
 However, since you ask, I prefer a writeup rather than a 40 minute video
for this kind of update, but based on the numbers above, they are making
good progress but are not there yet.

I 100% agree.
There is a link to the slide decks on Youtube.

Based on the above, I would guess/hope early next year for them to be ready,
which would put them a year behind schedule. It would be interesting to
know the reasons for the failures however and what is different about the
x86-64 environment that resulted in test differences that ended up being
classified as failures.
 In total, there's about 10% of the tests which have not been done or have
failed, but as we all know the first 90% of a project takes 90% of the
time and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time. :-)

Slide 39 says H1CY2025 so "early next year".
The slides list some of the challenges they had.
In my poor wording:
* like everybody else they had to start with cross compilers
   and then switch to native compilers
* they need to generate native code, so they needed to get
   GEM2LLVM and LLVM backends from VSI and integrate them
* like everybody else they got problems with C++ code because
   clang is not compatible with traditional VMS C++
* they relied on some tools build with VAX SCAN and first
   VESTed and later AESTed - since no IEST exist they had to
   rewrite those tools (in Java)
The slides does not say so, but it is probably a huge code base
and given that some of it is 4 decades old, then there may be some
hacks in the code.
Oracle DB - what is known as Oracle Classic in the VMS world:
     https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
:-)
Arne