Ada is back on VMS

Ada is back on VMS

[VMS Ada Alliance]

Hello,

For whom the information is unknown, VMS itself is back since 2014. The
company VSI (VMS Software Inc. Vmssoftware.com) negociated with HP to
give it support and future. Since this decision, VSI gives a quality
support to VMS on Alpha and Itanium hardware, and now the port to x86
and virtualization is about to be completed. Restricted Early Adopter
Kits can be obtained, which run on Oracle Virtual Boxes or vmware. A
full field test will begin in June, and the production release will be
here at the end of this year.

For us, more important, the information is that Ada is back on VMS.

It had been always available on Alpha (and VAX) as DEC Ada, and is still
there. It had been on Itanium until end 2014, as a GNAT Ada gcc
implementation, supported by Adacore. Adacore ended its support at the
end of 2014, and we organized a rebuild from FSF sources, with the help
of David Sauvage, AdaLabs. This build is presented here
(https://github.com/AdaLabs/gnat-vms). On our side we can provide the
binaries for users who can garanty they have a professionnel or hobbyist
licence for VMS (*) (the build uses VMS headers). (have a look here :
http://www.vmsadaall.org/index.php/en/). The pia-sofer company (Play It
Again SOFtwarE Renew, piasofer.fr) offers support for the package.

The novelty is that we can think now of a future of Ada on VMS, on x86.
VSI organized its set of compilers using LLVM as the back end, version
10. And there is on github a prototype of a GNAT Ada front end for LLVM.
So, we have just to test how make them interact. It’s not a trivial
project, but truly exciting.

We are just at the beginning of this work, and we’ll inform on this
group how we are progressing.

For sure everyone is invited to participate. It’s a little bit difficult
to get an Itanium, where you could test our build. Some itaniums are
available via users club initiatives (not yet in france, but the users
club vmsgenerations has a project on that). It’s more easy to get a free
Alpha emulator (for example here :
http://www.migrationspecialties.com/FreeAXP.html). And you can get a
hobbyist licence by VSI for both
(https://vmssoftware.com/community/community-license). Important, we do
think, to remember all the VMSisms before getting in the project. To
test the Gnat Ada front end on Linux is straitforward, and it is also a
preliminary work before porting on VMS
(https://github.com/AdaCore/gnat-llvm). We don’t know when VSI will
offer hobbyist licenses on VMS x86. Everyone who is thrilled to test
some VMS x86 (and on Ada compiler) can contact us, and we’ll organize
vpn accesses (contact@vmsadaall.org).

Our particular effort is about universality. We think it’s very
important to address the cultural continuity of Ada on VMS from VAX to
x86. There are a lot of good things written for Ada on VMS we have to
reuse (for example for debug). And because the more modern solutions are
around Adacore solutions, it is important to understand similarities and
differencies between the  GNAT Ada on gcc and the Gnat Ada on LLVM.

It’s a community effort. We hope VSI and/or Adacore will involve in the
return of Ada on VMS. And we know there are always been a good
collaboration between Adacore and communities. But companies have their
constraints, while individuals or Open Source structures can be
immediately reactive. Perhaps also it is a sort of garanty for users
when a community is there.

Don’t hesitate to contact us :  contact@vmsadaall.org


(*) It is a full fledjed 4.3.7 version, with all its gnat tools. And we
give in the same package the gcc c compiler and the gcc c++ compiler (of
that version). We are working on the libstdc++-v3 (also here, every help
welcomed, including just testing).