z/VM has LE ported over from z/OS.
So things cannot be all that bad in the world of CMS compilers.
"I have heard people rant and rave and bellow
That we're done and we might as well be dead
But I'm only a cockeyed optimist
And I can't get it into my head"
Oscar Hammerstein
David Boyes <[email protected]>
Sent by: The IBM z/VM Operating System <[email protected]>
12/10/2010 05:34 PM
Please respond to
The IBM z/VM Operating System <[email protected]>
To
[email protected]
cc
Subject
Re: Mandatory ESMs?
> 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no longer maintained in any real sense (a lot has happened in ISPF since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
