Re: ISO: The Eiffel OO programming language and IDE, on VMS

Le 26/03/2025 à 13:02, Arne Vajhøj a écrit :

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.

It's the most important point.
I think also that it is a very good way to create interest from younguer, and so being able to talk about VMS as an alternative for OS.
Creating future from past, with some of the modern tools. I'm sure there are people who can hear that.
But the evidence is that you cannot generate any interest with youguer if you do not adhere as strictly as possible to open source best practices. For now it is the stiking point.

 Arne