Re: New Vax - future directions :-)

[john%ziaspace.com@localhost]

First, I have to say that I can't imagine there are many places left where 
such interesting discussions can take place. I'm loving all of this :)

That said, I'm mostly interested in seeing what future directions could 
help the current state of VAX. The biggest issue I see when running bulk 
pkgsrc builds are floating point exceptions stopping builds. Usually this 
is because the build process tries things that usually never happens in 
real execution, which makes me wish for either:

1) alternate exception handling that allows continuing with and 
handling infinites and NaNs, which is doable with emulation / FPGA

and/or

2) IEEE 754 floating point emulation that isn't just soft-float, but uses 
the built-in FPU to do most of the work

If floating point were addressed, and if OpenSSL is fixed, we'd have many, 
many more packages built ;)

(If anyone wants to look in to OpenSSL, please do. I tried, but I don't 
know what to do when gdb dumps core...)

John