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Comment by jimktrains2 | Hacker News Reader

I just want to know who's still compiling against 16bit windows or OpenVMS. I know my world view isn't infinite, but those systems seem a bit out there.

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Yes, there are OpenVMS servers still around. I work with a number of them, and with various folks that are still using them in production.

There are recent builds of OpenSSL for OpenVMS:

http://polarhome.com/openssl/ http://www.openvms.org/stories.php?story=14/04/11/6422157

HP's version is a bit older:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/ssl/ssl.html

Free OpenVMS accounts:

http://deathrow.vistech.net http://decuserve.org

Part of my job involves writing software on OpenVMS. We actually just recently ported something that needed OpenSSL and were happy to find an up-to-date version.

Out of curiosity (sorry if that's offtopic), but what kind of workload are you running?

Is there anything except resources that prevent you from moving to a more modern platform? Of course, "it works" is a valid argument there, too. But you seem to be writing new code, too.

No, nothing except resources is in the way of completion of a move to a more modern platform. It's coming gradually, but we can't drop everything for a year or two to devote all of our engineering resources to getting us there.

OpenVMS has some really good ideas baked into the OS that we've had to reimplement or find off-the-shelf solutions for our new platform (for example a distributed key-value store (called "logicals"), a job queue system, and a clustered filesystem) but nothing so earth-shattering that it would keep us on VMS.

The biggest downsides are expensive hardware (OpenVMS is designed around clusters of a few beefy boxes, rather than many commodity boxes), lack of community knowledge, and lack of new software available for the platform. (End of life is also looming: http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/openvms_supportchart.html .)

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