The Hercules community is pleased to announce the
availability of two new freely-available operating
systems that provide 31-bit programming capability.
Load modules can be developed and tested on these
environments and the binaries work unchanged (and
without requiring special alternate APIs or support
modules etc) on their z/OS and z/VM big brothers.
Both are available from:
http://mvs380.sourceforge.netAn example of such a 31-bit program is GCCMVS,
the GCC C compiler (fully C90 compliant) ported to
MVS and CMS, and it comes bundled with the operating
systems. It is also available as a separate product
suitable for direct loading on z/OS and z/VM. See here:
http://gccmvs.sourceforge.netThere's also a stack of useful utilities there,
e.g. diff3 (a 3-way diff - one of the great
breakthroughs in computer science). These utilities
have been precompiled as part of MVS/380 and VM/380.
The port of GCC is dependent on the public domain
(not GPL) C runtime library PDPCLIB (also fully
C90 compliant). That is available here:
http://pdos.sourceforge.netOther utilities include bwBASIC, BREXX, bison,
sed, flex, m4, patch, minizip. There are also
specialized batch files to assist in targetting
the mainframe platforms from a PC.
The S/380 platforms have quite a lot of development
activity taking place (e.g. a DFDSS-compatible dump
program) to push these platforms forward. Come and
join us over at:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/hercules-os380
