[Simh] Alpha simulator performance

[Schmucker, Eric Carl]

I wouldn't attempt to compare any version of NT or later Windows OSes with VMS since my knowledge of Windows is lacking. But I have explored a large part of the Windows API and it does seem like a big mish-mash - very broad, but not as clean as it could be. But it may be unrealistic to expect it to be cleaner given the circumstances of its birth and evolution.

My memories of VMS are nothing but positive. I read all the manuals and various API references cover to cover in my first couple of years and then eventually moved on to kernel mode programming. In my opinion, everything I ran into was carefully and beautifully crafted. Some of the coolest things I ever wrote were created in those years. I loved the MACRO 32 language, VAX instruction set, and then the Alpha. With that OS, anything I wrote could be reliable and clean. The environment and tools available made me feel like a master engineer. The base was elegant so you could create elegance on top.

Today so much of what people do is not elegant, myself included. I feel like I frequently have to fight and kludge to create something reliable and clean. Maybe it is because VMS was smaller, you could know almost everything about it, so a great design was clearer. Maybe because it was designed by a like-minded group of people, once you understood the philosophy of the architecture, you could guess how borderline cases would be handled, and you could feel confident about the reliability and predictability of your own code.

I miss those days, even though I realize it may be impossible to every see something like it again, due to the fact that any modern development environment is going to be a mish-mash of tools created by different companies. In my current job, our system interfaces with 30+ other diverse systems with home grown APIs, message queue APIs, TCP, DB tables, etc. Too many choices makes for a bizarre soup.

-Eric Schmucker