> GCC for CMS [snip] Building a non-trivial program that involves existing libraries or code that must access things like CSL services is pretty hard to do with the CMS GCC port. It's a good tool for writing apps totally from scratch, but it's not something yet that I would rely on for really large mission-critical applications. The generated code is still very conservative in the instructions it uses and what machine functions it can/does exploit, to it's detriment.
I'm concerned that there's no Enterprise COBOL, no more development on FORTRAN, no up to date PL/1… etc, etc. The IBM C/C++ compiler is still maintained and current, but only because it's necessary for CP development. You can't order CMS VSAM any longer, so there's no direct access file capability from the old compilers without directly interfacing to assembler yourself. Nothing's been touched in SQL/DS for VM for ages now. TSM is gone. 2/3 of the function of DFSMS/VM is pretty much gutted in terms of usability or functionality. ISPF/VM is ancient, and pretty much no longer maintained in any real sense (a lot has happened in ISPF since 3.2). No Java since 1.3 (although that's no real loss, IMHO). APL2 is frozen in time. Pascal is frozen in time (and only still exists to service the bits of the VM TCP stack that aren't in C or assembler). Ditto RXSQL. Ditto Kerberos (the shipped K4 is nothing you'd want to build new apps on). Interactive Debugger? DMS/CMS? All pretty much in a zombie state. OpenVM? Not much to see there either — although we finally have some reason for BFS to exist with the new SSL server (not that it's all that much fun to use). You're pretty much left with assembler, C, C++, XEDIT, REXX and CMS Pipelines as the supported application development languages on CMS. That's a pretty powerful set of tooling by itself, but if you're trying to preflight applications and do development in the CMS world that is intended for other places and other uses, that's not much. 3 out of 6 aren't widely portable outside VM at all, and the other 3 are restricted to a small number of interfaces with a tiny subset of their function on other platforms. The writing is pretty much on the wall. I know the reason why, but it's still sad. -- db
