Deploying Ada across all VMS platforms allow us to reconsider legacies and IT development

What is it about?

How do we work with, and what can we learn from, working on very long-lived software environments? The Ada language and the VMS operating system share two qualities: exceptional robustness and a very long lifespan. This article presents the project to make Ada available on all hardware platforms on which VMS runs: from VAX to the new x86 port. Helping maintain software over very long lifespans requires a specific method to understand the decisions that were made, respect them, and potentially give them a new lease on life. Hence the similarity to the work of an archaeologist. To delve deeper, the theoretical question raised is that of the relationship between synthesis and repetition, thought and rebound. We will draw on the wisdom of the programmer who knows that a program works if and only if it works more than once.

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Why is it important?

In our era, where reusability, resource efficiency, and recycling are becoming essential issues, it is important to revisit these questions in the software field. We will ask ourselves why backward compatibility, considered an intrinsic quality of software, particularly for VMS, has become a potential and luxurious add-on under the term LTS. How is it that "spatial" portability (between various OS or hardware platforms) is taken for granted, while "temporal" portability is forgotten? The timing is crucial because it is time to reconsider, in light of these questions, the unexamined assumptions surrounding environments deemed "legacy." This project can help us reorient our relationship with software legacy.

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