On Wed, 15 Nov 2000, Patrick Spinler wrote:
> Allow me to ask a _extremely_ stupid question: have there been any
> efforts to port one of the existing C libraries to VMS ? (gnu c
> library, BSD library, etc) Perhaps as part of the semi-abortive FreeVMS
> project ? How desperately ugly would that be ?
>
> Alternately, could vms-perl steal code from these libraries to help fill
> in missing behavior ?
>
> -- Pat
I do not think that is a stupid question at all. I think (well the
last time I looked) there is a gaping hole in e.g. GNU on VMS porting
equipment, namely glibc (or whatever they call it nowadays). The last
time I looked the VMS ports of GCC and GAS could take source to object but
left it up to the system linker to link objects to the VAXCRTL.OLB. Does
anyone know that they now work differently? Does anyone on the list have
a working GCC and can compile, link, and run hello_world.c?
As pointed out in other parts of this extended thread there are a number
of C libraries being developed for use on VMS to scratch one itch or
another. I think it could prove helpful in the long term to have a
competition and be able to select a best of breed actually. Unfortunately
I don't think that GNU libc is playing a part in the competition at all.
As far as Perl is concerned I think that the overall improvement and
POSIXification of the Compaq C RTL will provide little incentive to
backport all the unixy stuff that perl needs. Even VMS folks do upgrade
their software on occasion :-)
Peter Prymmer
