A thread initiated partly because of a french initiative where
information came about rdb. The intiative is from an user group where
I'm part of its fondation, saving an old Decus group from dead.
The same thread about ADA, for which I built the compiler for Itanium
VMS in 2015.
A new proposition of method to go ahead with Ada.
Not any answer.
Perhaps the guy who wrote an Opened Letter against the death of VMS. The
same guy who didn't think a second that VMS could die and was thought as
a "poet". The same guy who was named VMS ambassador by Sue Skonetski
because of his action. The guy whom partner in France selled the first
VSI licence, because of decades of lobbying. This guy, perhaps, is
perceived as a troll and deserves being treated like a plague victim.
I have to apologize for all my commitment for VMS. The Big Bosses and
the Overactive Community must not be bothered. As could say Clair:
nothing heard. I hope my VMS customers don't hear this deafness.
However thanks to the one guy (be patient, don't confess you are friend
with the wrong guy) who answered In the Minute about what can be done
for Ada / VMS. The old spirit of the VMS community is not dead.
Nowhere man (you the song).
Post by John DallmanPost by John ReaganOur "GEM to LLVM" converter is not sufficient for our ancient DEC
Ada which was never on Itanium, just Alpha. What I have said is
that I personally think that an Ada solution would be helpful to
many customers.
Presumably, porting GNAT (Gnu Ada) may be possible in principle, but
would be a lot of work? There's work towards porting it to Itanium at
https://github.com/AdaLabs/gnat-vms
John
We have done this (cross-)built 4 years ago (we: adalabs, pia-sofer(me,
www.pia-sofer.fr)) with some friendly help of members of Adacore who
knew perfectly what was done for gcc/vms on Ada. We used a set of
headers from 8.4* itanium.
It is a little bit old now. For example we need a Linux wheezy
environment, wich is now archived. It is based en gcc 4.3.7
I (pia-sofer and a more community-oriented link here: www.vmsadaall.org)
am working now to go ahead.
First it seems possible to upgrade to gcc 4.9 which is the last version
for which adacore published on FSF. In the same time I am working to get
with the Ada compiler the C and C++ (gcc) compilers. It seems it is
possible. Eveything only on Itanium.
Second, with a little more effort, I'll try upgrades to more recent gcc
versions. I have to bring back the VMS specificities Adacore had taken
off. And pray that gcc improvments will not imply too much work on VMS.
This second step is a little bit "just for fun", not a priority. I would
like to understand what have been the technical difficulties Adacore
encountered to get off, even if I think the problem was mostly
commercial, and of bad relations with HP.
To get Ada on VMS/x86 the better way seems to play with the Adacore
work-in-progress of gnat/llvm (https://github.com/AdaCore/gnat-llvm). It
is something up-to-date (more than DragonEgg). I'm just beginning to
explore their work today.
For sure their use of llvm has to be tranformed to plug it on
VSI/llvm/x86. And I don't know how VSI could accept to communicate on
their llvm internals (on linux, itanium and x86). On my side I'm totally
open :)
Everyone is welcomed on a community effort. And I do think, because of
the nature (open source) and complexity (huge) of gcc, Ada and llvm that
only a community effort could do the job. I'll initiate soon a blog on
www.vmsadaall.org .