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

On 2025-03-26, 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.
>

In the case of rust there are major technical reasons. See below.

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.
>

Would any rust toolkit version even build with the version of LLVM
that VSI use ?

This posting claims LLVM version 17 is a minimum for the current version
of rust:

https://users.rust-lang.org/t/does-anyone-know-the-lowest-version-of-llvm-that-rust18-can-use/120096

How far back would you have to go before you find a rust version that
would build with the LLVM version VSI have currently ported ?

Also, you need a working CMake to build LLVM these days.

Simon.

--
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.