[Aldor-l] Portability

[Bill Page]

2008/8/29  Pippijn:
>
> during the Aldor Workshop, I talked with Bill Page about portability.
> There are operating system abstraction layers for various systems
> including VMS and DOS. Should these still be supported? Which of
> the others should still be supported?

My answer to both VMS and DOS is "no". I really cannot imagine anyone
seriously interested in running Aldor on these legacy systems. I think
narrowing the number of supported platforms and focusing on one
standard build system of all of them would have some important
advantages.

> I recently gained access to an OpenVMS cluster, but I didn't find a
> way to build aldor on it, yet. There is no GNU make on there, only
> MMS and MMK. Also, as far as I can see, the garbage collector does
> not work on VMS.
>

I used VMS on VAX hardware for many years and in spite of it's
reputation for reliability, I can not say that I miss it at all. :-) I
think there a much more interesting ways to spend one's time these
days.

> A major issue on VMS is that there can be no configure script. There is
> no bourne shell on that. The aldor build system as provided by aldor.org
> also heavily relies on the bourne shell existing on the system (or nmake
> for windows). Can anyone tell me how to build aldor on VMS? I want to
> see whether it runs at all..
>

I strongly recommend against it but well, if you **really* want to do
this, I think the only practical way might be using OpenVMS tools:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/freeware/index.html

unfortunately the OpenVMS itself does not include a C compiler. So you
will need something proprietary from HP:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/commercial/c/c_index.html

> ...

Regards.
Bill Page.