Developers attending the recent SIG3000 Languages Day learned more about what will be supported in upcoming versions of the e3000 operating system, and what won’t make the first release cut. True 64-bit address space won’t be available when the first IA-64 HP 3000s ship.

The technical detail came up when a customer asked about the absence of Pascal among native supported languages for the IA-64 systems. Colin Park of the HP development labs said that a true 64-bit kernel for the operating system will be available in an MPE release following the one first shipping e3000s that use IA-64.

“The current thinking is that to produce a true 64-bit kernel for MPE, so you can run 64-bit applications like you can on HP-UX, that we will not have the resources available to do that for first release,” Park said.

HP has cautioned its customers and developers not to expect any IA-64 e3000s to be available before 2002, and the e3000 division (CSY) has made a strong case for why the PA-RISC versions of e3000s will match performance of early IA-64 machines. The 64-bit kernel advisory appears to extend the current architecture’s performance advantage even further into the future, since any 64-bit programs won’t have the same level of support on MPE as they would on HP-UX.

“We’re not saying that it won’t ever be done,” Park explained of the 64-bit kernel project for MPE. “For the first release of MPE on IA-64, the run-time model will look very similar to the way it looks today: applications get 32 bits, and if you want to access the 64-bit address space, you do so using long pointers. The normal space will be a 32-bit, with 64-bit extensions, as distinct from a true 64-bit operating system.”

The 64-bit capability is an advance whose performance benefits are much debated in the developer community. Applications not written for 64-bits will execute in much the same way on either version of MPE/iX. But even re-writing an application for the larger address space may deliver less performance on an IA-64 e3000 that doesn’t have a true 64-bit kernel.

Park did comment that the vast majority of the new MPE for IA-64 will continue to be written in Pascal. But the specialized version of Pascal isn’t planned to be a released compiler for the new systems. “The current plans for that compiler are that it runs on HP-UX 10.20 and generates IA-64 code,” Park said. “That’s the extent of the commitment that the language people have given us so far on that compiler.”

“It’s not impossible for it to see the light of day if we ever get enough feedback, but the current plans go as far as giving us something to use to build MPE.”

Several developers at the meeting said they were interested in getting the internal HP Pascal compiler for their own porting use. “We have things that we need to port that are in Pascal, both to HP-UX and to MPE/iX on IA-64,” said Stan Sieler of Allegro Consultants. Scott Petersen of eXegeSys also said he needed the Pascal compiler to work on his company’s eRP manufacturing products.

Plans for COBOL

Another developer asked if CSY has the technology resources in the division to move COBOL across to the IA-64 architecture. Duane Percox noted that IA-64 is especially dependent on compiler technology for performance, and said he’d noticed there is no COBOL compiler in the HP-UX environment off which CSY can leverage its work.

“We’re still working on that [issue], and there are numerous options,” said Randy Roten, the engineering manager in charge of language ports for the e3000. “One obvious option is to figure out how to marry our compiler front ends to the codegen of the back ends we get from the HP-UX effort. There may be third party solutions, and other people may have done compiler development by that time that we could leverage off of.”

“We don’t know how we’re going to get there at this point,” Roten added. “It’s still a ways down the road.”

Another HP engineer assured the developers the transition would be handled well. “IA-64 is really based on a concept called PA-RISC,” said Eric Vistaca of HP’s Roseville language labs. “HP has some of the best compiler people in the world who have been working on this stuff for years now. All they need to do is find the right way to take something like today’s COBOL II compiler front end and hook it up to these really incredible back ends. This will give HP the best performance of anybody running on IA-64. If we were a [Digital] group worrying about this stuff, it might be a big deal.”

HP reported that COBOL II has been enhanced for the 6.5 release of MPE/iX to support larger files and the new KSAM64 file type. The language has also been improved to support compiles of programs up to approximately 600,000 lines in size.

The committee discussions around the newest COBOL standard, currently being called COBOL 2000, are also being monitored by HP. Walter Murray, the engineer in charge of COBOL for the e3000, sits on the standard committee, and MPE/iX consultant and advocate Bob Karlin is also a full member of the J4 standard committee.

Native to IA-64

HP reiterated its message about which e3000 languages will be native in the first IA-64 release. Pascal, Fortran 77, Transact, RPG, Business Basic and SPLash will use dynamically translated PA-RISC code on the new systems.