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From: sean@DSL.PITT.EDU (Sean McLinden)
Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew
Subject: Re: porting atk to VMS
Message-ID: <9011080510.AA27272@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu>
Date: 8 Nov 90 05:10:13 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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There are two options for Unix compatibility:

1. VAX-C 3.0 plus the DECShell and VMS connection (UCX...something or
other), which in it's most recent form supports select(2) and other
Unixisms.

2. VAX-C or GCC with Peter Kay's sockit library which runs over
Wally TCP/IP, CMU-TEK TCP/IP, and maybe another (not, currently,
Multinet).

I dunno about the former, but the latter implements only enough
of the functionality of sockets to support the implementation
of basic TCP/IP services. The full functionality of the socket
library is a bit more difficult in VMS, because of VMSs way of
handling asynchronous IO, so that any socket emulation is going
to be targeted at specific applications. The better approach
would be to use QIOs, but that means changing a good deal of
code.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see someone do it. But we 
decided that it would make more sense to wait for all of our
applications to migrate to UNIX, and then trash VMS, then try
to "fix" VMS.

Sean McLinden
Decision Systems Laboratory
University of Pittsburgh