Ada on openvms for Alpha

Ada on openvms for Alpha

[Eugen Wintersberger]

Hi folks 
I have a rather unusual problem: I am looking for an Ada compiler for openvms  for Alpha. GNAT no longer supports openvms for Alpha (a decision I Can entirely understand from an economical point of view). However, I Have a couple of Alpha boxes running openvms and I would love to see them running Ada code.

Does anyone of you own a GNAT license for openvms Alpha or knows someone who does and would be willing to give away this license or sell it to me?

Thanks in advance and best regards
  Eugen Wintersberger

Ada on openvms for alpha

[brbarkstrom]

A colleague of mine is running openvms on several old alpha workstations. After 
learning enough about openvms to really use the boxes he wants to run some ada 
software on them. Unfortunately GNAT no longer supports openvms on alpha. Does anyone who owns a license for an ada compiler on openvms/alpha be willing to 
sell their license?

Is so, reply to me and I'll pass along the information to my colleague.

Bruce B.

Re: Ada on openvms for alpha

[Shark8]

On 10/24/2014 10:20 AM, brbarkstrom@gmail.com wrote:
> A colleague of mine is running openvms on several old alpha workstations. After
> learning enough about openvms to really use the boxes he wants to run some Ada
> software on them. Unfortunately GNAT no longer supports openvms on alpha.
> Does anyone who owns a license for an ada compiler on openvms/alpha be willing
> to sell their license?
>
> Is so, reply to me and I'll pass along the information to my colleague.
>

Nope -- But this illustrates one of the weaknesses of the Ada market:
If there's only a single free [and up-to-date] implementation, then if 
it drops support for a platform that platform is inaccessible to Ada 
programming.

Hopefully the situation with GNAT being the /only/ free and modern-spec 
implementation will change shortly.

Re: Ada on openvms for alpha

[David Botton]

> Nope -- But this illustrates one of the weaknesses of the Ada market:
> If there's only a single free [and up-to-date] implementation, then if 
> it drops support for a platform that platform is inaccessible to Ada 
> programming.

I don't know if that is accurate, as long as there is an open license on GNAT there was no reason for anyone to not take on supporting it if there was a demand (obvious there is no financial demand or AdaCore would continue).

Just like there is no reason that GNAT can't be forked by others and worked on.

The real problem is that there isn't a known business market for Ada outside a small (but 'overly' lucrative) niche and no company has invested the marketing to create or find those other markets yet.

For example, I don't have the interest nor am I the expert, but some one that wanted to a make a few dollars should be able to roll this guy an openVMS alpha of at least an older version of GNAT that will work. I am sure he would be will to pay for it.

> Hopefully the situation with GNAT being the /only/ free and modern-spec 
> implementation will change shortly.

I don't know how much it matters if GNAT is the only one, what matters is if AdaCore is the only one working on it and supporting it. They have been good about giving back to the FSF much of their work, but let's say they pulled the plug on that effort (which would not surprise me) just like they did with the license "shtick" on GNAT-GPL.

I think it would be cool to have competitive open source Ada compilers, but it is more cool if there were more people working on what exists to insure its long term future use for the community use.

David Botton

Re: Ada on openvms for alpha

[Luke A. Guest]

David Botton <david@botton.com> wrote:

> For example, I don't have the interest nor am I the expert, but some one
> that wanted to a make a few dollars should be able to roll this guy an
> openVMS alpha of at least an older version of GNAT that will work. I am
> sure he would be will to pay for it.
> 

Don't quote me on this but I'm fairly sure the VMS packages are not in the
FSF tree.

Luke

Re: Ada on openvms for alpha

[Simon Wright]

Luke A. Guest <laguest@archeia.com> writes:

> David Botton <david@botton.com> wrote:
>
>> For example, I don't have the interest nor am I the expert, but some one
>> that wanted to a make a few dollars should be able to roll this guy an
>> openVMS alpha of at least an older version of GNAT that will work. I am
>> sure he would be will to pay for it.
>> 
>
> Don't quote me on this but I'm fairly sure the VMS packages are not in the
> FSF tree.

GCC 4.9.1 has 58 files with *vms* in the name in gcc/ada. For example,
mlib-tgt-specific-vms-alpha.adb, mlib-tgt-specific-vms-ia64.adb

Re: Ada on openvms for alpha

[Brian Drummond]

On Sat, 25 Oct 2014 12:29:00 +0100, Simon Wright wrote:

> Luke A. Guest <laguest@archeia.com> writes:
> 
>> David Botton <david@botton.com> wrote:
>>
>>> For example, I don't have the interest nor am I the expert, but some
>>> one that wanted to a make a few dollars should be able to roll this
>>> guy an openVMS alpha of at least an older version of GNAT that will
>>> work. I am sure he would be will to pay for it.
>>> 
>>> 
>> Don't quote me on this but I'm fairly sure the VMS packages are not in
>> the FSF tree.
> 
> GCC 4.9.1 has 58 files with *vms* in the name in gcc/ada. For example,
> mlib-tgt-specific-vms-alpha.adb, mlib-tgt-specific-vms-ia64.adb

And the alpha backend still looks to be there in gcc/config/alpha . 
If nobody's built it in that configuration for years there's likely to be 
some bit-rot, but it may be recoverable with a bit (probably quite a lot) 
of work.

- Brian

Re: Ada on openvms for alpha

[Simon Clubley]

On 2014-10-26, Brian Drummond <brian3@shapes.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> On Sat, 25 Oct 2014 12:29:00 +0100, Simon Wright wrote:
>
>> Luke A. Guest <laguest@archeia.com> writes:
>> 
>>> David Botton <david@botton.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> For example, I don't have the interest nor am I the expert, but some
>>>> one that wanted to a make a few dollars should be able to roll this
>>>> guy an openVMS alpha of at least an older version of GNAT that will
>>>> work. I am sure he would be will to pay for it.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> Don't quote me on this but I'm fairly sure the VMS packages are not in
>>> the FSF tree.
>> 
>> GCC 4.9.1 has 58 files with *vms* in the name in gcc/ada. For example,
>> mlib-tgt-specific-vms-alpha.adb, mlib-tgt-specific-vms-ia64.adb
>
> And the alpha backend still looks to be there in gcc/config/alpha . 
> If nobody's built it in that configuration for years there's likely to be 
> some bit-rot, but it may be recoverable with a bit (probably quite a lot) 
> of work.
>

You start by building it as a cross compiler on Linux and use copies
of the VMS headers and libraries from your target system. Of the four
target languages I tried (Ada, C, C++, Fortran) these were the results
from building the cross compiler:

Ada	Internal compiler error while building the GNAT frontend
C	Test programs written in C and compiled on Linux using the
	cross compiler appear to run ok on VMS
C++	Build failure while building the cross compiler
Fortran	Test executables build and link and then fail early on
	during image activation on the target VMS system.

The C++ issue looks reasonably easy enough to fix, but I wasn't motivated
to spend any time there until the Fortran runtime failures and Ada
internal compiler error issues were fixed.

In the end however, there was more work involved than I was willing
to spend given that I have a large stack of other hobbyist projects
which are of more interest to me. :-)

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world

Re: Ada on openvms for alpha

[brbarkstrom]

On Friday, October 24, 2014 12:20:17 PM UTC-4, brbar...@gmail.com wrote:
> A colleague of mine is running openvms on several old alpha workstations. After 
> learning enough about openvms to really use the boxes he wants to run some ada 
> software on them. Unfortunately GNAT no longer supports openvms on alpha. Does anyone who owns a license for an ada compiler on openvms/alpha be willing to 
> sell their license?
> 
> Is so, reply to me and I'll pass along the information to my colleague.
> 
> Bruce B.

Thanks for the information.  I'll pass along what I've gotten and see if
anyone else responds.

Bruce B.

Re: Ada on openvms for alpha

[Simon Clubley]

On 2014-10-24, brbarkstrom@gmail.com <brbarkstrom@gmail.com> wrote:
> A colleague of mine is running openvms on several old alpha workstations. After 
> learning enough about openvms to really use the boxes he wants to run some ada 
> software on them. Unfortunately GNAT no longer supports openvms on alpha. Does anyone who owns a license for an ada compiler on openvms/alpha be willing to 
> sell their license?
>

Are you talking about FSF GNAT (because as far as I was aware ACT was
still selling GNAT Pro for OpenVMS) ?

If so, then yes, there's apparently no longer a public version of GNAT
which will build for VMS. I don't know if you (or your colleague) follows
comp.os.vms, but I've had a couple of goes over the last couple of years
trying to get the FSF kit to build for VMS.

I didn't invest too much time in it because VMS is no longer a major
hobby interest of mine (I only use it as part of my non-Ada day job
now) but it appears that FSF GNAT either needs some very specific
and undocumentated build settings or (much more likely) not all the
required bits for VMS are present in the current FSF kits.

OTOH, if you mean ACT are no longer selling GNAT Pro for VMS, could
you please confirm that because it means that VMS support is unlikely
to ever be completed in the public FSF kits.

Thanks,

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world